Short Films / Big Ideas #10 2011

This week we're looking at satire. There are plenty of great examples out there (we've featured Plot Device recently as a hilarious satire of genre films), but today we want to focus on something not just funny, but also topical: Facebook. What Facebook Is For is an animation by English film maker Mike Booth and is part of his Some Grey Bloke series. The short film (3 minutes), features an ordinary, middle aged guy, talking about the reasons he uses Facebook. In the process it pokes fun at all of us for why we use it.

This film can be a good starting point for talking about satire. Why is it important to make fun of people and institutions in our society? Why is this an important part of living in a democracy? What Facebook is For can also be the starting point for students to do their own satirical writing in response to satirical newspaper headlines about Facebook such as: 'Shock Discovery! Person the same in real life as their Facebook profile'. There are a number of others. Students can choose a heading they like or find funny, and write a mock newspaper article to go with it. As an example of satirical newspaper articles, you might like to show your students The Onion - a mock US newspaper site.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #16 2011

Why should we use micro blogging tools in the classroom? One powerful reason is that students spend a considerable amount of time microblogging each day. While there are currently no Australian statistics available, US statistics show that teenagers between 13-17 send and receive over 3000 texts each month (it's higher for girls) and spend upwards of 2 hours each day on the web (most of it on facebook - you can read a report about it online here. You might also look at it with your class and ask them to compare their experience with what is being documented in the research). That's a lot of time essentially being spent reading and writing micro blogs - short pieces of text recording the author's views about whatever is the hot topic of the moment. So if our kids are producing and reading all this writing, why aren't we trying to harness some of this enthusiasm in our class?

Over our next couple of blogs we want to look at micro blogging tools you can use in your classroom. Many teachers already use micro blogs in their classroom to get students to keep:

*Learning journals

*Create pages on areas of interest

*Create pages on a topic / theme being studied

*To work collaboratively

*To write for an authentic audience

Today we're looking at 'disposable' pages. These can be a good starting point for blogging in the classroom, because they are tools that allow you to create pages without requiring a sign up or login, and aren't designed to keep forever.

One of the easiest tools to use is Jottit. This tool allows you to create an instant, short web page without needing to sign up and create an account. Later, if you want, you can add a password to the page so you can revisit it and add to or change it. Another web tool in the same vein is Penio, a more attractively presented version of Jottit.

These two tools make great ways for doing some blogging on the fly, getting groups to collaborate on or present their work, or to get stuck into some micro blogging without any hassle. In future weeks we'll review tools with more advance options for microblogging.

Short Films / Big Ideas #9 2011

There's many terrific Australian short films out there. In the past we've blogged about Tropfest winners - one of our favourites being Lucky. This week we're looking at another award winning Australian short film - Zero. Like another of the films we've looked at, Bottle, this film is a stop motion animation that uses unusual material for the figurines in its story. Bottle uses snow and sand for its characters. Zero uses string.

The film is set in a repressive world where people are numbered according to social status. Zero marks the people on the bottom rung of society, 9 is for those who are on top. Our hero of the film is a zero. He spends the first half of this short film mocked, excluded and vilified by those around him for being a zero and wondering how he can make "something out of nothing." When he meets another zero, however, and falls in love, things turn around. What we won't tell you what happens at the end, but there's smiles all round.

There's a range of things you can do with this film. After watching it and discussing it, we can get students to think about: What is something really unfair about the world today and how would you change it if you were in charge.

We can also ask students to pick out key quotes. You can watch half the film, get them two write down two important things that have been said, watch the rest of the film and then repeat the step. After discussing it, we can then get our students to write a summary of what happens using quotes as a way of practising integrating quotes into writing.

But what we're most interested in is getting students to think about genre. Available for download at our resource page is a list of different genres. Get students into pairs, give each pair a copy of this sheet and ask them to rank the genres. Which genre does this film most belong to and why.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #15

The best web 2.0 tools to use for education are those that require no sign ups, are quick to access and genuinely contribute to the sharing and discussing of ideas in the classroom. We spend hours each week looking at different web 2.0 sites out there, and dismissing most of them. But here's a little gem we found just recently. It's called Tricider and ticks all the boxes.

Tricider is partly a brainstorming tool, partly a debating tool, and partly a discussion tool. It starts out with a user simply jumping onto Tricider's home page and posing a question in the question box. This generates a unique page with a URL which the user can then share with others. Once others have this URL they can visit this new Tricider page and add ideas about this question, arguments, pictures and vote on what others have said. It's a terrific little tool to promote and extend discussion. We could start by asking a question about:

*Why a character does something in a text?

*What should be done about a certain issue?

*How we could make the world a better place....

We've set up an example one for you to look at on the question: How can we use social media more effectively in the classroom? Find it here.

Short Films / Big Ideas #8 2011

A few blogs ago we talked about the short film Plot Device - a great example of a meta-textual text about genre. Plot Device is also part of a growing body of films called 'brand films'. What are these? Brand films are films that are sponsored by a brand name - such as Coke, BMW or Gucci. Plot Device was sponsored by American software company Red Giant. The idea of branded films is that they tell a story about a core product value or idea. The focus of these films is to be entertaining and tell a story, rather than 'in your face' about consuming the product. Essentially, it a response to our increasing disengagement with traditional advertising formats.

Today I want to look at a short, entertaining animated example of a branded film. It's called Back To The Start and is sponsored by American fast food chain Chipotle (It's Mexican fast food). The point of the short film is to focus on the sustainable, organic way the produce Chipotle uses for its food is grown. It's an interesting film to use as the basis for a discussion with your students about the effectiveness of advertising. We can ask our students a series of questions:

*Do you think fast food advertising makes a difference to what fast food you buy?
*Do you think people care about how their fast food has been produced?
*After watching the Chipotle ad what do you think is most likely:
1) People who already eat at Chipotle just feel better about eating there
2) People who may not have eaten at Chipotle are more likely to eat there

Last of all, we can ask our students - are these sorts of short films are good trend or a bad trend? Advertising is more entertaining like this - but it's difficult to tell it's an ad. Is this a bad thing? What is brand names started make feature length brand films. Would this be a good idea?

Ticking Mind Bulletin #14 2011

Using ridiculous words like "phantasmagorical" can be impressive and spice up your writing. We say this, because one of the things we're constantly talking to teachers about is the importance of teaching vocabulary. In previous posts we've written about web 2.0 tools such as wordle and visuwords which can be used as vocabulary stimulus and as extenders respectively. Today we're blogging about another interesting vocabulary tool we've just started playing around with recently. It's called Wordnik and can be found here: http://www.wordnik.com/

Wordnik is dedicated to creating lists and exploring the meanings of words. It can be used as a straight dictionary/thesaurus tool, where you can get students to simply look up words. Using it like this can be effective as the site offers not just a series of definitions for each word, but an extensive list of related words, examples of contextual uses (including how the word has been used in recent tweets and blogs), and the top images that come back for an image search for the term.

However, a more interesting way to use this site is to get students to create a profile. This is quick and easy. Once they have done this they can create their own word lists and comment on the lists of others, and even create collaborative lists. This means at the start of each unit (or as a unit progresses), students can create and refine word lists on the topic being studied. As the year progresses, students can create many new word lists. This encourages students to explore and take control over their vocabulary.

On the subject of vocabulary, here's a few quick activities to get students thinking about the nuances of meaning of words:

1) Give students two opposite words such as 'angry' and 'happy'. Using a tool such as Wordnik, get them to find synonyms for these words as well as related words. Get students to then create a word spectrum - with 'angry' and 'happy' at either end of a page, and five to seven words arranged along a line in between them depending on what students see as the exact nuance of their meaning. Where would 'upset' come along the line or 'jubilant' or ' calm'?
2) A related activity, is to get students to brainstorm words to describe a character in a text being studied. They pick one of these words, and then find as many synonyms/related words for this word as they can. After this, students look at the words carefully, and list them according to which one most precisely (through to least precisely), describes the character. Worknik is a great tool to use for this activity.

50 Great Ways To Teach Texts

How do you engage students with a text? How do you teach narrative structure, character comparisons, themes and symbols in an interesting and deep way? We have spent the past two years compiling highly effective and engaging strategies to teach texts. Some are very simple such as these:

Character Comparisons:

1. Divide students into pairs
2. Get each pair to write down all the character names in a text on individual post-it-notes
3. Students must now divide the characters into 3 groups according to their own rule
4. They must record the groups and give a reason for the grouping.
5. Students must now re-group the characters (repeat this step for as many times as your students can do it).

Some activities utilise handouts such as the ones below:

These are just a sample of the comprehensive range of activities that will help you teach all aspects of a text at Years 7-12. You can now purchase the guide as a digital download in PDF format for AUS: $39.95. Buy and download by clicking the button:

Short Films / Big Ideas - Halloween Edition

It's not Halloween for a while (it's at the end of October), but we wanted to do our Halloween edition of our Short Films / Big Ideas blog now to give you time to get organised to run a mini (or full) unit on horror. Horror is a terrifically engaging unit to do with Years 7-9 students. However, often we can't watch films in our classrooms that students find scary. At home, they watch films like 'Saw' or 'Fright Night' or 'Scream' - all of which have an MA rating and are unsuitable for classroom viewing. Fortunately, there is a range of scary short films out there which can provide a fright to our students without needing to use gratuitous blood and gore to do so.

Below is a list of our favourite short horror films which you can watch in your 7-9 classrooms. Before you do this you might also like to get students to explore how much they already know about the horror genre. On our resources page we've put a Horror Plot Creation handout. This handout lists typical settings, characters, orientations and complications you will find in a horror story. In groups, students pick a character, a setting, and 1-2 orientations and complications. Using these elements, they then need to generate a horror story of their own. Students will have a lot of fun coming up with their horror plot and then sharing them with the rest of the class. They will also see how formulaic the horror genre is. Download the resource here: http://www.tickingmind.com.au/resourcedownload

Pencil Face -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MjTb5A68VA

A girl discovers a huge pencil that will draw anything. But what are its motives?

Bump -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U58oZj-fZ6s:

In this classic horror short, two young women alone in a house hear a 'bump' in the night and decide to investigate.

Alma - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58iXypYPNrw

A girl investigates a mysterious doll shop.

Spectre - http://vimeo.com/1228438

What's happening in the background when a man is shaving?

The Facts in The Case of Mister Hollow - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzw8qdXCep8

One picture - what's the story behind it? A unique horror short about vampires.

We particularly recommend playing Pencil Face and Spectre with and without music and asking students to think about the important of music as a technique in horror.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #13 2011

Today's bulletin is partly a short film one, and partly a web 2.0 one, and partly just a 'get the best out of your laptop' one. To begin with, we want to remind people about Keep Video. This is a web tool that allows you to download videos from Youtube. This is a great tool to use if your school blocks Youtube or you have slow wireless at your school making it difficult to show Youtube videos.

The tool can be found here: http://keepvid.com/. To use it, you simply need to cut and paste the internet (or URL) address of the Youtube video you want, visit Keep Video and paste it in the clearly marked box. Keep Video will then give you a number of different file formats you can download the video in. MP4 is best.

You might like to test this out on a favourite video of ours. It's been a viral hit on the net and has now been watched by over 20 millions viewers on Youtube. Some of you may have seen it. It's Ksenyia Simonova's Sand Animation from - surprise, surprise - 'Ukraine's Got Talent'. In real time, Ksenyia creates a series of sand drawings representing Germany's invasion of Ukraine in the Second World War. There is no dialogue, just the sand pictures. No historical context is needed to understand the story - because it could be any place, anywhere. It's and extraordinary short film which your students will be fascinated by. It can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo

One reason we like the film is that it is an amazing illustration of the power of visuals in film. In your class, it can be used as a comprehension activity. To help you do this, we've uploaded to our website a handout you can give to your students. There is eight stills from the video on the handout. After watching the video, discuss with your class what it's about and then get them to put some plot summaries to each picture. You can find the handout here.

You can capture your own stills from films. If you have a PC, it's easy. Simply use the small print screen button up the top of your keyboard somewhere (it's different on different PCs). Play your film and then just click on print screen when there is a visual you want to capture. You can then open a Word document and click on paste and the picture will paste into the document. If you have a Mac you can use the Grab Screen function in Utilities. This will allow you to capture stills from Youtube, but not from films played with DVD Player.

Short Films / Big Ideas #7 2011

In our last edition of Short Films / Big Ideas we looked at the creepy short film Pencil Face. To see what we said about this short film see our blog entry below. For those of you who are fans of creepy films, our next Short Films / Big Ideas post will be the Halloween edition.

However, today we want to look at a brilliant example of a 'meta' film. We've shown this a few times recently in our PDs because it's a great example of film narrative technique. The short film we are talking about is called Plot Device. The plot is thus: A film student is roaming Amazon's online bookstore looking at film making guides when he comes across a mysterious object for sale called 'plot device'. He buys it. When it comes, it turns out to be a large button. What does he does? Of course he presses it. He is instantly swept into a romance film. We know this genre straight away because we see a beautiful woman in a wedding dress running towards him (in romance genre fashion) shouting the words, 'it's always been you.' He presses the button again, and is transported into a new genre. And so he goes on from genre to genre until the resolution of the short film. It's 9 minutes long. And very funny. Watch it here.

There are several interesting things about this film. To begin with, it's an entertaining introduction to the idea of genre. Show the film to your students and ask them to pick out all the different genres or styles of films that are shown. What were the identifying features of each genre? What films have your students seen recently, and what genre do they belong to?

Secondly, the film is a very conscious example of the narrative feature of the 'plot device.' There are two types of problems that can happen in a text: 1) A character problem (called the 'inner' problem); 2) A plot problem (the plot device). In a good story a character has to struggle with and overcome their inner problems. However, this struggle has to first be activated by an external problem arising - an asteroid hurtling towards earth, a new girl on the scene who the protagonist really likes, an enemy, or the discovery of a mysterious object: all these are examples of plot devices - a narrative prompt that forces the character to do something and confront their own problems. 

Have a chat with kids about this and then get them to think about the film they have seen most recently (or can recall the best). Give them each a copy of the Plot Phases handout which can be downloaded from our website here. This steps them through the stages of a narrative and will help them identify the different between the character problem (which they often won't be able to identify) and the plot device (which they often think is the main complication). After this, students can move on to creating their own short stories which contain these two narrative elements.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #12 2011

If you could have any backyard, what would it be? One of today's Web 2.0 tips is a tool that allows students to think about just that - and create their own, unique backyard. This can become the stimulus for a descriptive writing task: In my imaginary backyard there would be...

PBS (The American Public Broadcasting Service) has developed a tool that allows users to select from a wide range of backgrounds and then insert objects into the backyard. No account is required. It's easy and fun to use, and the image created can be saved and printed off at the end as stimulus for the above task. Find the tool here: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/offthemap/html/create_your_own.html

Students love Web 2.0 tools because they are visual. The next tool we want to discuss is Sketchcast - an online drawing tool. There are loads of online drawing tools, but what makes this one unique, is that you can record yourself doing your drawing and talking about it as you're doing it.  The video can then be posted on Sketchcast's website. Students will need an account to use this site, but it only takes a minute to create. Once you have filled out your username, password and email address, you can get straight into creating a drawing and recording yourself.

There are lots of ways we can get students to use drawing as a learning tool in class. They can draw:

- Pictures or icons to represents characters from texts

- Important places in the setting of a text

- Create charts or concepts maps about ideas

- Draw pictures to represent vocabulary terms

- Draw pictures to represent any type of content they have just read

Drawing pictures requires students to actively think about the content they are trying to represent visually. If they draw it, and talk about it at the same time, it's great evidence that learning is taking place. Set students any of the above tasks, direct them to Sketchcast, and get them to record themselves talking about the picture as they draw it. Once a video has been created, it will have its own unique web URL and can be visited by your or any other student. See the tool here: http://sketchcast.com/

Short Films / Big Ideas #6 2011

Something creepy today. Last bulletin we looked at Dangle and Black Hole. Today's film, Pencil Face, is similar to both those films in that it contains no dialogue. It's also similar because it involves the protagonist discovering an object that can do amazing things. However, whereas Dangle and Black Hole are more science fiction or dramatic in genre, Pencil Face leans towards horror.

The film clocks in at 3.00 mins. In the film a girl discovers a huge pencil with a maniacal grin (as you do). She soon finds out that whatever it draws comes to life. But can a huge pencil with a creepy grin really be out to do her a good turn? Of course, like Black Hole, the protagonist in this film ends up falling victim to the magical object they thought safe to use. Unlike Black Hole, where we feel the protagonist deserves what he gets in the end, we don't feel this about the girl in Pencil Face. In that sense, the film is a good study in characterisation. It can be watched side by side with Black Hole and we can ask our students at the end: did the main character deserve what they got? Why? In Black Hole, the main character is greedy - he deserves what he gets. However, in Pencil Face, the girl uses the pencil to draw objects like a kite and a birthday cake - things of childish innocence. We like her.

Pencil Face is also a simple but effective illustration of sound as a filmic technique. The accompanying music is creepy and rapidly gives us a strong idea of the plot direction. Play the film for a minute or so and ask students to predict what happens in the end. Ask them to think about how music contributes to their sense of where this film is going.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #11 2011

In our last post we discussed one of our favourite web 2.0 tools - Popplet. It's a simple and attractively presented mind mapping tool that also allows for collaboration (check out all our previous bulletins here). Today's bulletin is about online survey or polling tools.

Polling tools can be used in a number of ways in the class:

*Get an overview of students' opinions about an issue - or different aspects of an issue

*Get an overview of how students feel about characters or the ending in a text

*Get an overview of how students feel about a theme or topic being studied

*Students can create their own list of 'powerful' questions to ask about a text, issue or topic and poll each other

Polling tools are a way of getting everyone in a class involved and providing feedback. They also provide a starting point for class discussion.

There are two polling tools which are particularly good. The first is Flisti. This is a well presented tool that is quick and easy to use. It requires no account or log in. Simply visit the page, create a new question and then share the URL it creates with your students. Students themselves can easily create questions, too. Find the tool here.

Votos is also easy to use, but requires an account and a log in. If you have a Facebook or a Twitter account (which most of your students will), you can log in with these. Otherwise you can create your own account. Votos' features are slightly more advanced - giving you more options on how people can respond to your question (such as ranking answers). Find the tool here.

Both tools allow people responding to a question to also give a written response. This make both these polling tools ideal feedback tools. Students need to tick an answer to the question, but then provide a brief written response. If students are doing this all at the same time, response information is updated live - so they will be able to see the survey results develop in front of them, and read the comments from other students. Once you do this, you'll easily see how it can spark class discussion.

Log onto our practice Flisti question here - should we let students use Facebook in our schools?

Ticking Mind Bulletin #10 2011

One of the things the Web 2.0 is best for in the classroom is to allow students to visualise their learning. There are many Web 2.0 concept mapping tools that can be powerful learning aids in the classroom. In this blog we want to talk about what we consider the best - Popplet.

Popplet is a concept mapping tool that is more attractively presented than every other available online concept mapping tool, is easy to use, has collaborative functions, and allows users to insert pictures and web pages into their concept maps.  See the picture below (or, if it isn't displaying, click here)



















Concept mapping can be an effective way for students to explore and represent their understanding of ideas and how they link. However, often concept mapping is done poorly in the classroom. Here's a procedure to follow:

1. Students start by listing 10-15 words, phrases or ideas that they most associate with the topic being studied
2. On their concept map, students first place on the map the topic in the centre
3. To the left of the map students write the word from their list that has the strongest link to the topic being studied. They explain the link by drawing a link to the topic in the centre and annotating this link with an explanation.
3. Students next place the word from their list on the concept map that is most logically linked to the first word they wrote. They explain the link to the first word and also draw a link to the topic in the centre and explain this link if appropriate.
4. Students then place a word  on the map that can most logically be linked to the previous word, performing the same steps as above.
5. Students keep going in the same fashion until they have linked all their words.

The beauty of this procedure is that it gets students to focus on meaningful links between aspects of the topic being studied. Popplet makes an ideal companion because it gives students an infinite canvas on which to create their concept - it also means they can continue to revise and edit as they go along.

To use Popplet, students will need to create an account. It's free and quick. If every student in a group creates a Popplet account, one student can create a new Popplet and then share it with the other members of the group who can all collaborate on the Popplet at the same time. This is perfect for the classroom in which every student has access to a laptop.

Further to the above concept mapping procedure, Popplet is also a great tool for creating plot recounts of a text being studied. Give students 15-20 digital pictures that can be associated with events from a text somehow (you'll need to save these pictures as separate files on the network where students can access them), and ask your students to arrange them in order from left to right in a Popplet page to represent the order of events from the text. They can then annotate each picture.

Find Popplet here. 

Short Films / Big Ideas - Little Big Shots Edition

In our last Short Films / Big Ideas blog we listed a number of films from this year's Tropfest finalists that we thought worth watching and discussing with your students. This week we're looking at another Australian short film festival - Little Big Shots. This is an annual Australian film festival that tours that country and is hosted in Victoria by ACMI - The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Basically the festival showcases a range of films made by kids or that can be enjoyed by kids. It screened a few weekends ago. Unfortunately, many of the great films it showcases aren't uploaded on Youtube. However, listed below are a selection of some of the best shorts that can be found on the web from the last three years of the festival. We've included a link, along with a writing prompt.

2009 

Sooner or Later

A squirrel and bat need to work together to overcome a stray acorn that get stuck in the cog machinery that makes the world work.

Prompt: When something goes wrong with nature, it’s everyone’s problem...

http://videos.www4.arte.tv/de/videos/frueh_oder_spaet-3931004.html

***

Pinaroo Surfer (From the ‘Directing The Hero Within’ series - find out more about this at - http://www.changemedia.net.au/tag/youth/page/2/)

A local Pinaroo boy shows us his love for surfing, even though Pinaroo is 300 kms from the sea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btea3dSOCuc

Prompt: No matter where we come from, we can still do what we want... 

2010

Tin Can Heart

A tin dog gives his heart to a robot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQcr57YfY10

***

Breaking The Mould

An apple explores the world before finding its home.

http://vimeo.com/1905940

Prompt: We all belong somewhere...

2011

El Tux

A boy is embarrassed about wearing his father’s tux to a school social.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt9QcaWzzeo

Prompt: Good things can come from embarrassing moments...

***

The Sandwich Movie

The narrator remembers his sister making a special sandwich for him.

http://vimeo.com/groups/will/videos/16566024

Prompt: What’s something important that someone once did for you...

Short Films / Big Ideas - Tropfest Edition

This week we're looking at some of the finalists from Tropfest - Australia's very own annual celebration of short film making, that bills itself as the world's biggest short film festival. Unlike previous weeks where we have focused on strategies to get students thinking about, discussing and writing on ideas in the films they have watched, in this post we are encouraging you to invite students to evaluate and pass judgement on the films they have watched. In short, you can watch through the films short listed for Tropfest's best short award, and ask students to pick out the one they thought best. All this year's Tropfest's finalists can be watched at the festival's Youtube channel here.

We don't recommend that you watch through all of them, but we do recommend that you watch through some of our favourites:

*Silencer

*The Applicant

*Animal Beatbox

Before you watch through the films, you can discuss what makes a good film - and what makes a good short film. After you watch them, students can share their responses to each film in terms of how they evaluate its quality. You could do this several ways - by making a heading for each film on the classroom's whiteboard, giving each student three post-it-notes, and asking them to share an evaluation about each film by writing a comment and sticking it under each heading. Alternatively, if you tuned into last week's web 2.0 post, you could use a virtual sticky board to do this activity - Wall  Wisher.

As students discuss and make comments about the films, ask them to rank them in terms of quality. Once they have done this, you can tell them that the winner was Animal Beatbox - it will be interesting to see if students had this as their first choice, and how they respond to it being the winner if they didn't (here at Ticking Mind we find Animal Beatbox annoying rather than interesting).

Finally, students can actually write up a review of all three films.

In our next post, we'll be looking at same great short films that have come out of another Australian short film festival - ACMI's Little Big Shots that has been screening this week.

Ticking Mind Bulletin #9 2011

Welcome to our latest bulletin on great web 2.0 tools to use in the English classroom. If you're new to our bulletin, or want to catch up on previous posts (including our last one on Megan Gale's twitter controversy, which you can look at in class with your students as an issue), click here. This week we actually want our post to be interactive: so we are using two interactive tools to both share ideas and demonstrate the effectiveness of the tools themselves.

Wall Wisher is a great way to get everyone participating in class discussion and sharing ideas. With this tool, a user can create a virtual 'sticky board' that other users can visit and post sticky notes on. No account is required to use this tool. When a user creates a new board, it has a unique URL which can be shared with others (the sharing can be restricted or totally public). This works well in class for brainstorming sessions where you want everyone to contribute ideas. As each student puts up a note, everyone else will be able to see it. We've created our own sticky board here  - http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/filmstostudy - and we'd love you all to visit and add a sticky about different films you are studying in your classroom. That way you see how the tool works and we can share some great ideas. All you need to do is click on the link, then click somewhere on the page and create a new sticky.

The next tool is similar. This is called 'Lino It.' Like Wall Wisher, this is a tool that creates virtual sticky note boards. The key difference between the tools is that Lino It allows users to write longer sticky notes and to colour code them. Lino It also requires the user who creates the board to have an account. Once an account holding user creates a board, they can then share it publicly with anyone in the same was as Wall Wisher. It's a great tool to use when you want students to share more detailed ideas or to share resources if they are all researching a similar topic or issue. Students can keep a track of the different websites they have visited by putting stickies on a class board with a link to the site and notes about what was good about it. Users can also stick documents, videos and images on the sticky board. We've set up a board here -  http://linoit.com/users/jpinnuck/canvases/Great%20websites%20. We'd like you to share on the board some ideas about great websites you've been using in your classroom. All you need to do is click on the link, then click somewhere on the page and create a new sticky.

Short Films / Big Ideas #5 2011

Here at Ticking Mind we're absolute suckers for romantic comedies. One of our favourites is 500 Days of Summer. We talk about this film in our 30 Great Films To Teach & How To Teach Them sessions as it's a terrific example of the romantic comedy narrative structure. This week we want to talk about an extremely popular Australian short romantic comedy - Signs. This 2009 short has now been watched by nearly seven million viewers on Youtube and once you watch it, you'll easily see why.

It tells the story of young, lonely man who works in an hum drum office job. The orientation phase of the film quickly establishes that our protagonist is keen for a relationship. This happens, but not in the conventional way. He looks out his window and across the street to the office next door one day, and locks eyes with a female office worker. From this point they begin to hold up large written messages for each other to read. It's a charming film, and, like 500 Days of Summer, a great example of the romantic comedy narrative. 

Here's some activities you can do on the film:

1. Watch through the first few minutes of the film until the protagonist begins to exchange signs with the officer worker in the next building. Ask students to predict what they think will happen next? Why do they think this? What do they know about the romantic comedy formula?

2. At the end of the film, give students the Romantic Comedy Narrative handout attached. Ask them to look through it and identify the stages that were represented in this short film.

3. Finally, you can ask students to think about the purpose of the romantic comedy formula. Ask them to write about this: Like other types of films, we enjoy watching romantic comedies because they make us feel good, but in no way do they actually represent real life...