Tag Archives: video

In the Studio with Kirsten Lepore

April 26, 2013, 11:21 am • Posted by Kristin Farr
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photo/kristin farr

photo/kristin farr

Kirsten Lepore is an artist and filmmaker who works with different animation techniques, including stop-motion animation and claymation. Creating personal short films and animated segments for clients such as Yo Gabba Gabba, Whole Foods, and MTV, Lepore is known for her hand-fabricated film sets and characters made from an eclectic mix of materials including clay, food, sand and snow. Her wildly popular food-themed film, Sweet Dreams, stars a butternut squash who shows a cupcake the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. The award-winning film is remarkable in its production design, art direction, and wordless storytelling style. We visited Lepore at her Los Angeles studio to learn more about the intentions behind her food-focused film, the unusual materials she works with to create her animations, and why she loves the laborious process of stop-motion animation.

Kirsten Lepore also gave us a hands-on demonstration of her preferred techniques for creating claymation. Lepore's technical set-up is sophisticated, but the animation process is simple and can be recreated using digital cameras and editing programs like iMovie and iStopMotion. Even flipbooks are a form of animation.

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Filed under: Art School, Arts
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Three Innovative Arts Education Resources

January 25, 2013, 7:24 am • Posted by Kristin Farr
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Screen Shot 2013-01-23 at 4.29.53 PMCheck out three of our favorite resources focused on visual arts in education:

Red Studio is the Museum of Modern's Arts interactive and collaborative project with high school students in New York City. Exploring "issues and questions raised by teens about today's modern art, working artists, and what goes on behind the scenes at a museum," the site features interviews with artists and opportunities to make digital art. The image above was creative in Red Studio's REMIX interactive collage tool.

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Art Babble is like YouTube for art videos. This site was developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and features videos from partners including KQED, PBS's Art:21, The San Jose Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and many more, including national and international organizations. Videos are organized by medium, location, themes, and time period. There is a special section specifically for educators with classroom-appropriate videos and resources.

Screen Shot 2013-01-23 at 4.48.11 PMArt Education 2.0 is a Ning networking web site initiated by professor and educator Craig Roland. It hosts a robust collection of resources and offers many opportunities for idea sharing and networking among fellow arts educators. Membership is free, and there are currently over 12,000 active members who upload ideas, videos, and photos to share with their global community of colleagues.

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Filed under: Arts, What's New in Arts!
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Four Great Sites for Teaching About the Science of Winter Sports

December 12, 2012, 1:46 pm • Posted by Andrea Swensrud
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photo by Arthur Mouratidis/Wikimedia Commons

Winter break is just around the corner! And there's a good chance that some of your students will be watching or participating in winter sports during the break or over the next few months. Engage students with examples of scientific concepts in action! Teach about the science of skiing, ice hockey, snowboarding, ice skating and more with the following multimedia resources.

  1. Science of the Olympic Winter Games (NBC Learn)
    NBC Learn, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, delves into the physics, chemistry and engineering behind various sports of the Winter Olympics. A collection of 16 videos covers topics including the connection between speed skating and Newton's Laws of Motion, the engineering of skis for different ski-based sports and the physics of ski jumping.
  2. Inside the Action (The New York Times)
    This collection of six videos, created for the 2010 Winter Olympics by the New York Times, uses video footage, animation and graphics to break down and analyze various "tricks." Discover how snowboarders, skiers and figure skaters execute their winning moves and runs.
  3. The Science of Hockey (Exploratorium)
    This site from the Exploratorium incorporates video and text to examine the sport of ice hockey. It explores questions like, "Why is ice slippery?," "What's in a puck?" and "How do you hit a puck 100 miles per hour?"
  4. How It's Made: Snowboard (Discovery)
    Learn the process of making a snowboard in this video from Discovery. A great opportunity to investigate the crucial role of science in the manufacturing of materials.
Filed under: 6 -12 Science, Science
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The impact of video in education (infographic)

November 9, 2012, 12:40 pm • Posted by Matthew Williams
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Earlier this week, Ed Tech Times posted an insightful infographic about the power of video in education. It was produced by Cisco to accompany their recently published white paper.

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Filed under: Digital Tools, New Ideas with Digital Tools
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Media Ripping Tools 1: Easy YouTube Video Downloader

October 26, 2012, 8:31 am • Posted by Matthew Williams
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Remixing video has become a popular cultural movement. We see it all over the internet where people re-purpose video to convey an alternative message. The Mister Rogers remix entitled Garden of Your Mind, produced by PBS Digital Studios takes hundreds of clips from dozens of episodes to create an inspirational song about learning. The audio of his voice is put through an auto-tuner to make it sound like he's singing.

This was made by professional producers, but remix culture is really a DIY movement and the tools are available for pretty much anyone who has a computer and internet connection. One relatively new tool that allows you to edit videos from YouTube is Easy YouTube Video Downloader, a free add-on from Mozilla that allows you to download videos from YouTube. It's an add-on which means that it creates an interactive button underneath the YouTube player to let a user download any video on YouTube. Once the video is downloaded, you can import it into a video editing program like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to edit.

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Filed under: Video Educasts
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Digital Portraits and Cindy Sherman

August 13, 2012, 12:13 pm • Posted by Kristin Farr
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KQED Arts Education and a group of local educators just completed our second annual "Digital Portraits" course for educators. Last year, we studied California artist Robert Arneson's approach portraiture and created short, autobiographical films (Check out last year's assignment and two of the films in the Edspace archive).

This summer, the artist we looked to for inspiration was none other than Cindy Sherman, who has a retrospective on view at SFMOMA through October 2012. Sherman has been called one of the most important artists of our time and was featured on Art:21. She is known for using herself as a model to create photographic portraits of women who do not represent the artist, but personas and characters she creates.
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Filed under: Arts, Teacher Trainings
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Science Lab in San Mateo County - Classroom by the Bay

July 30, 2012, 5:00 pm • Posted by Nancy Yamamoto
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Science Lab in San Mateo County - a collaborative partnership between KQED Education, STEM Center of San Mateo County Office of Education, and Marine Science Institute.

Just a few weeks before the start of another school year, 22 teachers across San Mateo County gathered at Marine Science Institute, located in Redwood City. This group of Pre-K to 3rd grade teachers registered for KQED Science Lab and were excited to plunge into four days of professional development.

The teachers came dressed in layers for unexpected Bay Area weather and sat outdoors overlooking the San Francisco Bay Estuary. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect. The warmth of the sun, clear blue skies and the occasional sighting of brown pelicans gliding above the shores, set the stage for a jam-packed day of learning about marine science.  Sharing the space with the teachers that morning were 50 young children participating in the Shoreside program. Both teachers and children were on a mission to learn from the bay, find cool critters and have fun.

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Filed under: K-5 Science, Science
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Five Ways to Use PBS LearningMedia in Your Classroom

April 23, 2012, 2:34 pm • Posted by Almetria Vaba
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PBS LearningMedia is the next generation digital library from PBS and affiliates designed for educators to engage students in media-rich learning environments with videos, audio, and interactives. With over 20,000 resources, and more being added weekly, LearningMedia is the place to reimagine classroom learning, transform your teaching, and engage your students in new ways.

There are many ways to go about searching for different resources, but what are the most effective ways to use this library? Here are my top 5 favorites from a list of ten ways suggested by Iowa Public TV to incorporate PBS LearningMedia into teaching.

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Project VoiceScape: We All Belong Here

November 17, 2011, 10:09 am • Posted by Matthew Williams
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"My parents traveled by boat and plane before finding a home in San Francisco." Ifeanyi is one of several students in James Lick Middle School's Peer Resources class who is a first generation immigrant. His parents traveled from Abuja, the capital of Nigeria to New York City by boat, lived in Queens, and then flew to San Francisco where they currently reside. Their story is one of success.

However, this is not the case for many immigrant families who struggle to live in the United States. We All Belong Here tells the amazing story of Ifeanyi's family, but the film also glances at what it is like for most immigrants who move here. It is a struggle of economic hardship, abuse, and discrimination. Watch this video that examines the complexities of immigration on a personal level.

Check out the film which was produced by Ifeanyi Ebochie, Andrea Reyes, Jocelyne Umanzor, & Ariande Tziu who are students at James Lick Middle School.

This video was made in collaboration with KQED and San Francisco Peer Resources as part of Project VoiceScape, a partnership with Adobe Youth Voices, PBS, and POV that is aimed at encouraging middle and high school students nationwide to use digital media tools in creating compelling stories about issues and concerns important to them. At Lick Middle School, the students all picked different themes to explore like depression, immigration, graffiti, video game addiction, domestic violence, and race and discrimination. Students produced incredibly poignant films about social issues that personally affect them. Through this personal lens, these films aim to express issues subjectively and do not attempt to hold any sort of objective journalistic integrity. These films also do not represent the opinions of any of the partnering organizations.

Filed under: Community Voices, News in the Community
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Digital Self-Portraits Workshop 1.2: Great body of work!

July 1, 2011, 5:13 pm • Posted by Matthew Williams
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Sharon

Hi everyone,

I'm back from my trip to Philadelphia where I attended the ISTE conference -- a lot of educational technology stuff. It was really interesting, but I have to say that I kept thinking about the work you are all doing in this workshop and how impressive it is! Some of your stories are so powerful and honest and I really appreciate all of your courage to go "there" for this workshop. It has made it so meaningful.

So technically, our work is not finished. Some of you still want to complete your films -- finesse them and so forth. I would like to give you time to do this, but do not want to prolong it and lose momentum. Can everyone please promise to be finished with your films by Friday, July 8? I would want everyone to upload their films to YouTube as well as send me a digital copy of it.

If you need guidance on how to export your movie and upload it on YouTube, I can be of help. Please email if you need help.

Also, I would like you to now take the time and reflect on the work we did in class. Please think about what you learned, what you still need to work on, the process you went through in making your film, and how you would ultimately frame this project with your students. So, in short, I'm asking you to respond to this question and comment in the comments section below: How would you use digital self-portraits in your class? What other learning objectives could it connect to? What would be the challenges? What value would it add to your students' learning?

From this point, Kristin and I will help you get your project on its feet in the Fall. We will follow through with you so that perhaps, we can present our work at the ISTE Conference next Summer in San Diego!

Thanks again for your great work and dedication!
Matt

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