Running with Scissors

I spent last Friday in my daughters’ elementary school as a presenter for Career Day. I was representing the “instructional technologist” occupation – one that I get a lot of practice explaining since most adults don’t know what I do either.

I brought a video projector and some of our iClicker student response systems to show the kids in kindergarten and 3rd and 4th grade. Kindergartners got to vote on “What is the BEST color” (red and blue were very popular), while I had the older kids choosing a favorite between SpongeBob, Harry Potter or Jack Black (SpongeBob and Jack Black were the winners here). After a few fun questions like this I told them about how we can use the clickers to test what students understand. So, the last question I had for them was “What does an instructional technologist do?” Most of them got the answer that I taught them – “Help students and faculty use technology to make their teaching and learning better.”
I also had a good number of kids who preferred a different answer that I had as an option – “Plays video games better than anyone else” – what they wanted my job to be.

Either way, they loved it. They liked the voting and I had no problems with the technology the 11 times I went through it. And my presentation held their attention, even among the police cruisers and firetrucks that other presenters brought, so that was good too. And as a bonus, there are a group of kids in elementary school who know more about what an instructional technologist does than their parents do. :)

Jim is always pointing us to his favorite YouTube videos, including things he has created himself using old footage from movies or archive.org.

In his honor, here is one for him that I’m sure he will enjoy – it is a fan video created for the Massive Attack song “Angel” that uses a scene from a 1932 film, “Vampyr.” This video is so well done that I didn’t even realize this was not done by Massive Attack until I read the credits on the YouTube site.

This one is so haunting, it is mesmerizing. Enjoy Jimmy!

UPDATE – 12/2/07

I found the entire “Vampyr” film on Google Video for your viewing pleasure.

Andy just got his Reverend Jim t-shirt. As you can tell from the picture, it is already having a wonderful effect on his ability to concentrate on web 2.0 issues.

Want a shirt? Get it here.

(Your results may vary.)

Our media guru, Andy Rush, often posts interesting music videos on his blog, And He Blogs. One that he posted that I really liked was of the band OK Go doing some intricate choreography on treadmills. The creativity of this video was the totally unique vision here. If you have not seen it, take a look.

I found one yesterday that falls into that same theme – totally unique.

Mute Math has produced a video for their song “Typical” where they shot it backwards, and then play it back forward. So you get unique results like paint flying off of someone.

Enjoy, Andy. :)

In my effort for daily blogging, I missed a day yesterday.

So here is a bonus post.

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