Though the summer is usually thought of as two months when teachers goof off and do nothing (and I did some of that), some of us do get a few things done.

I got a chance sit down with Joel Ralph of Canada’s History Society and plan out TeachMeet, a workshop at the Manitoba Social Sciences Teachers conference in October. The plan, in a nutshell, is to get Social Studies teachers together to meet each other and share ideas. Since we’re all doing more or less the same thing trading ideas amongst ourselves seems logical yet rarely happens.

We’re also planning a sort of sequel to that on December 8 when we’ll bring together teachers in an informal atmosphere to talk, share ideas and contact information, and listen to and interact with a couple of informal speakers.

I also had the chance to go to a couple of workshops. One was presented by ManACE, and featured Sandy Debreuil as instructor on the use of flash animation. Sandy is a great instructor and it was a really cool two days.

I also spent a morning at a New Media Manitoba workshop on Social Media. In a school setting social media could do so many interesting things. Admittedly, there’s so many things that could go wrong. Education is always a balancing act. You have to give some room to explore, but you have to make sure that there isn’t so much room that the kids hurt themselves or others. It’s tricky to make that work.

We’re formally back in front of the class in a few days, so I should get to work and finish preparing.

This year I was assigned a computer media course to teach which intimidated me since I really don’t know that much about that stuff. Clearly, I learned at least as much as the kids did. I also learned (again) that sometimes you need to give the kids freedom to play with your media toys and they’ll do some things that would have never occurred to you to try. One of the better projects told the story of Cinderella with the help of a few green screen effects.  The students uploaded their video to YouTube, so you can judge for yourself what you think of it.

I’ve love history, but I have to say that I love history’s quirkiness. Maybe that’s why this made me laugh.

I’m always fascinated when I see these kinds of videos. They are simple but make a very clear point with little or no fancy props or flourish. As a Social Studies teacher and a Computer teacher seeing these videos leaves me wondering if or how I could accomplish something similar with my students.

It’s that time of year again and my students are just about done creating stop motion videos. Here’s one of the first ones to come in.