Rather than flood my colleagues’ email boxes with links for them to check out, I thought I could at least point to things here that I would spend more time sharing if I had a ‘mo…as it were.

I just ran into David Truss, who was referred to on Twitter (that exploration has proved worthwhile to me) whose wonderful post about the two wolves works wonderfully with our “social studies” theme in the K-2, about emotions, feelings, and self-control. Plus, it just works!

The person who brought my attn to David, also brought to my attention this diverse (and certainly not the current popular media vision), andcertainly mind-ful look at autism –thank you, Dave MacLean, truly worth your viewing. (So glad you followed me on twitter, so I checked out what you shared there, and found this video!) I have had the amazing privilege of meeting Ari, and Amanda, and many others on that video. My son Alex introduced me to these peoples’ point of view (in order to help me understand him, and advocate for his needs).

Two videos and this story were relatively new to me, perhaps not to you… about the power of music to make change

Now, to gather info about paper airplanes, to enrich my aeronautical 2nd grader and help him prepare a presentation for his classmates.

I have a desire to share this sort of inspirational video with parents and co-teachers–the same way I’ve shared shorter videos with my intermediate and middle school level students. I wish all school families could enjoy a video and have a conversation to respond to it, much the way book groups form.

BUT, I want more! I want more families and co-teachers to find these video shares than just the few who would come to a book group. Would being on the net increase participation? What would be most engaging?

I’m not sure how to hook others into joining this kind of conversation. I’m going to mull it over and look for a way to open.

1. I ask students to think about what point they want to make before beginning. Examine the data, decide your message, pick an image. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of camera tricks. I like Sony’s Bravia commercial, which  makes the simple point “Color like no other” without any computer trickery. Here’s the link:

In order to capture the vibrant reality of the balls and the way they moved, every single frame was shot on camera – computer graphics weren’t used at all.

Sony : The BRAVIA ‘bouncy balls’ commercial : United Kingdom

It is a beautiful video that my students enjoy. They also enjoy the “making of” explanations linked here next, where they show how they blasted balls out of cannons, were ready with many cameras to catch the quick action, and broke windows in the making…

Behind the scenes How we did it

Sony : The BRAVIA ‘bouncy balls’ commercial : United Kingdom

2. A fun spoof of the Bravia commercial and related website that an ad firm put together, using fruit instead of balls (they have a link on the web page that shows you the “commercial” they are complaining about).

Swansea North Residents Association website

Swansea North Residents Association – Welcome

We are a non-profit organisation that meets every Sunday, around about tea time, to discuss the needs and views of Swansea North residents.

3. Next, here’s a link to a Bravia spoof created as machinima (having “Avatars” in a game or other online world operated by people who arrange to go online to the already existing scenery provided by the game world and meet and act out scenes using their avatars. Having one or more avatars act as the “camera” stationed to observe the mayhem, the action is captured and can be shared). Warning, this is filmed with battlefield avatars, and each character is military, and carries a weapon as part of the gameworld design.

Circulating only throughout the internet, a video filmed by a clan features 64 players simultaneously hopping down a slope and over HMMWVs on the Sharqi Peninsula, a map in Battlefield 2. Instead of “BRAVIA – Color like no other” at the end of the original Bouncy Balls commercial, the clan’s video read “Bunny Hopping – Like no other”

BRAVIA – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an overhead shot from another spoof video/in-game melange. It doesn’t have the Bravia reference (it does include references to the seagulls in “Finding Nemo” (Mine), Monty Python, and CNN news coverage of Iraq). This was also done by the same group, dubbed “Snoken,”as the machinima above. Each avatar on the screen is operated by a different person, and they have coordinated quite a bit to accomplish this. Again, warning, the characters are armed, and in this one, there are some other challenges, like explosions.

I’ve found this wonderful link to a series of “pictures that lie.” (I’ve been getting a feed on the newly added bookmarks of del.icio.us user LibrarianEdge and this site was added by LibrarianEdge today–Thanks!). I’m extremely excited, because I was looking for a way to broaden the wonderful message of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (see my earlier post, here) and help it cross over to the male students I have. When I checked out the site, though, it addressed much more than body image issues.

It addressed censorship, political exigencies, propaganda, critical thinking, editing, feminism, media, photoshop ethics, and more (Oh, My!)! It helps place the information media awareness I want students to cultivate, the critical thinking skills they need to harness to be savvy on the web, into a perspective that includes a long history of media manipulation:

Before the invention of the digital image, the Soviets removed Trotsky from News Photos and archives when he fell out of favor and American farmers were shown with truck-sized crickets on their farm equipment. — See images 14 and 17.

The website makes it clear that image manipulation (lies, deceitful lies!) is not something only from the past, as it includes modern day images (Cover photos from Newsweek, Time, and TV Guide; modern icons such as Oprah, Katie Couric, and Martha Stewart).

My students don’t have to feel I am shining a spotlight on them as potentially gullible–these photos were aimed at a wide readership. It will be up to me to help the students realize that they can value Katie Couric and Oprah without being manipulated into putting them onto a “body image” pedestal that really isn’t them (isn’t means, in this case, that their heads were pasted onto model’s bodies for those cover shots). It will be up to the students, actually, but this should help them realize they need to look critically at EVERY image they see. Who put it there, who does it serve, is it touting a political point of view or reinforcing a powerful entity (political or corporate)…or just selling more TV Guides?

In earlier grades, I had students explore a wonderful webquest where they develop their own rubric to “rate” a website using information they researched (about authority, currency, etc.) and then they test their rubric by evaluating a pair of websites: one fake, one real. Students found the fake sights could fool some of them, some of the time…and they were not happy with that! I added additional “fake or fantastic” websites and we explored them as a group followup.

Now, I hope to help my students see how pervasive, and how easily accomplished, are “images that lie.” And that those images aren’t just aimed at fooling them–but at all of us. I’ll tell them that old saw:

Fool me once…

And I’ll mean, ME, too. I’m in there with them.