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New Ways to Teach Old Lessons

A teacher's struggles with kids dis-interest in plants...

With competition from thrill-a-minute video games and big, brown-eyed, furry creatures threatened by the encroachment of man, it i not always easy to maintain a child interest in plants. Our children are impressed these days with the medium as much as the message. George Lucas said in an interview that the youth speak a different language, a new "vernacular" of images, colors, sound and just bits of written word.

We must teach communication comprehensively, in all its forms. Today we work with the written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people's culture. We live and work in a visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication, not just the written word.
        -George Lucas, Visual Literacy in Education interview, Edutopia magazine, Sept 2004

Here is the approach one educator, David Williams, took and posted on his ning blog.  Pretty impressive.

Find more videos like this on The Synapse

The software used is Animoto. It is an online service....no software needed. Just upload your images and the rest happens like magic. Thirty second videos are free to create. Give it a shot. You will be seeing more video and animation on this site in the future. It is the way we communicate in the 21st sentury.