The Longfellow Ten placed First Runner Up in the category of Best Educational Use of Video in the 2009 Edublog Awards. Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Hopefully, some of this recognition will help us in our efforts to recruit new LF10 members. Wanna join?
Our collaborative stop-motion project, The Longfellow Ten, has been nominated for an Edublog Award in the category of Best Educational Use of Video / Visual. Please take a few seconds and VISIT THIS LINK to cast your vote for us!
We here at the LF10 Headquarters are excited about this nomination. However, we’re even more excited that this nomination, and possible award, could help us in our ongoing efforts to recruit some new LF10 members. Wanna join?
The East-Coast Syndicate of The Longfellow Ten (that’s us) has been hard at work over the last few months cranking out new films. We’re on a mission to promote awareness of important academic terms and concepts through absurd stop-motion films.
The new film posted above, Onomatopoeia, was put together last week and involved about a dozen LF10 members. We have lots of new films currently in production. It’s also rumored that the mysterious Midwest Collective of the LF10 (Minnesotans I believe) are about to start posting some new films. Please stop by the official Longfellow Ten website and leave these young stop-motion film creators an encouraging comment!
I was recently interviewed by Jane Park from Creative Commons about some of the ways my students and I use CC licensed content in our classroom projects. We also talked about our recent Q & A Skype session with Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig. The interview is part of the ongoing CC Talks With… series. Ms. Park was especially interested in what motivated me to start using Creative Commons in my classroom in the first place.
As we all know, many students, even middle schoolers, are posting all sorts of content online, as well as downloading content. Yet many of these students have no idea that it’s illegal to download copyrighted material via peer-to-peer file-sharing sites like Lime Wire. They also are not clear on why they cannot embed copyrighted songs into their videos and post them on YouTube.
My students and I have been embedding CC licensed content into our various projects for more than two years now. We also post our own content online, some of which is licensed under different CC licenses. By introducing the idea of Creative Commons to students, and allowing them access to CC licensed content, teachers are not only tapping into a wealth of resources, but also helping educate students on basic copyright law.
CC Logo by Creative Commons
We’ve been learning about George Melies, the father of special effects, in my film literacy class. Melies was a French illusionist and magician, who after viewing the Lumiere Brothers early film projector in 1895, the cinematographe, started making his own films. He was an early pioneer in special effects. Many of his special effects were done in-camera. That means he used the camera to create the effects, not any editing devices. One of his most popular films was the sci fi production, A Trip to the Moon.
He invented the special effect known as “stop-trick.” This special effect involves turning the camera off, moving objects in and out of the frame, then turning the camera back on again, making it look like things appear and disappear as if by magic. The YouTube clip above is an example of the Melies “stop-trick” special effect. My students had to create short films in the style of the early George Melies films. Here’s an example of one of our films incorporating the Melies “stop-trick” special effect:
I wonder what George Melies would have thought of watching many of his films on YouTube today, over 100 years after he made them. Check out the rest of our short George Melies style films on our class website, watCH OUT!
Last year, Mr. Stelzner, a colleague of mine, and I started our collaborative after-school stop-motion project, The Longfellow Ten. We thought it would be fun, and useful, to have students create absurd stop-motion films about important literary terms. We also thought it would be helpful to share our films online, so others could use the site as a resource in the classroom.
We recruited a few other middle school teachers in other states to join our project. Kevin Hodgson, a teacher in Massachusetts, and his 6th grade students, head up the Northern Contingent of the Lf10. Ben Upton, a middle school teacher in Minnesota, jumped in with his students and started making stop-motion films about science concepts for the Midwest Collective of the LF10. Mr. Stelzner and I, and our students, make up the East Coast Syndicate.
In a little over a year, we have collectively added 52 stop-motion films to our official LF10 website. Students have created films that cover 43 different academic terms and concepts. We have over 170 comments on our various films, and over 4,000 page views to the site. We are hoping to continue to expand the project this year, and recruit new members. If you are interested in getting your students involved, or have any questions, please let us know. It’s not necessary to have any experience with stop-motion. A year ago, we didn’t have any experience ourselves!
Remixes & Copyright Law
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Sites & Questions About YouTube
One of my film literacy classes had the chance this week to participate in a Skype video conference with Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig is an expert in copyright law, and is on the board of directors of Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation “dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.”
In his most recent book, Remix, he argues that we shouldn’t criminalize an entire generation of young people with outdated copyright laws.
It was very gracious of Professor Lessig to spend a half hour taking questions from my 7th graders. I edited the Skype conversation into two separate videos. This Skype session is part of our ongoing conversation about what we can and can’t do on the Internet. As Professor Lessig points out in our conversation, copyright is extremely complicated.
The Endless Pockets. A short film created in the style of the early Edison Kinetoscope films.
My two 7th grade film history classes have been learning about the earliest moving picture devices and the inventors who created them. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, also invented the kinetoscope.
The kinetoscope was not a movie projector. It was a box-like device that viewers had to peer into in order to see the films. Many of his earliest films, like The Sneeze, made in 1894, appear like they’re in slow motion because they were still figuring out how many frames per second it took to make the films look realistic.
Untitled. A short film created in the style of the early Lumiere Brothers.
On the other hand, films made by the Lumiere Brothers, who invented one of the earliest movie projectors, appear much faster. Like Edison, they were also experimenting with the number of frames per second.
After learning some of the history of these early filmmakers and watching some of their work, students created short films in the style of both the early Edison kinetoscope films and the early Lumiere Brothers films. Students faced the same limitations as early filmmakers: one camera angle, one take of film, and no sound. They added aged film and black and white video effects during post-production.
To view other films check out our webpage, Watch Out!
The Free Sound Project, supported by Google, is a user-generated database of Creative Commons licensed sound clips. All the sounds on the Freesound Project are licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling 1.0 license. This type of copyright license allows you to legally download, remix, and reuse the sounds in whatever way you’d like. It’s an amazing resource for the classroom, and a great way to start conversations with your students about copyright issues. 
This year, we started our own Free Sound account under the username, payattention. We’re recording and uploading sounds we discover around our school. The sounds we recorded this week, like this one, Doorslam.mp3, (image above) are already being downloaded by the Free Sound community. My students and I have really enjoyed, and benefited from using Free Sound over the past year, particularly our stop-motion club, The Longfellow Ten. It’s cool that we are now also contributing to the ever growing Freesound Project database.