My students have all turned in their memoirs and are moving on to a suspense story. I read Mark Twain’s “Ghost Story” to them today to introduce the concept of suspense. The story is about the Cardiff Giant which was a practical joke played a hundred and fifty years ago on fundamentalist Christians. It’s kinda like the flying spagetti monster, except everyone believed in Cardiff Man and it made the maker $30,000 before being sold to the circus. Anyway, the story sparked lots of discussion about how to build suspense in a story. We talked about Jaws and Aliens and Lost and all sorts of scary movies and suspenseful stuff.

I always start with a prompt for journaling at the beginning of class and today’s prompt was, “Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?”

We started by drawing a twisted peice of wire. Then we drew a drawing upside down. Today we drew our hands without looking at our hands. The goal was for students to improve their eye hand co-ordination. To build the connection between the movements of their eye and the movement of their pencil is not easy. It requires patience and focus. The instructions were to move your eye along the creases and wrinkles of your hand and document your eye’s behaviour. I had students turn around in their chairs and rest their elbows on the backs of the chair and then write at their desk so that it made it hard to turn around and look. The idea was not to make it look like a hand, but to make a document of the attention you gave to the lines of your hand.

Then I taught students how to draw their hands. With the upside down drawing, they had been instructed to move their eyes back and forth from the object to their paper, but today, I told them I wanted to up the game; I wanted them to spend more time looking at their hand than their paper. I also wanted them to keep drawing while they were looking at their hand and just use their eyes to check back and see that they were on the right track. This is advanced drawing and is not easy. No tracing your hand like a turkey and it works best if you make your hand into a claw or some other contorted position so that there will be lots of overlapping shapes. I enjoyed supporting students as they worked by reminding them to go slow, keep their hand next to their drawing, and encouraging them to draw what they see.

I had a visit from an administrator today who loved the lesson I was giving and said, “Slowing down and using focus is a skill everyone needs in life!”

Artists in Italy have made a giant pink bunny the size of the Uffington White Horse in the United Kingdom. I imagine it will be a great way to bring tourists to the hills of italy… Since I’m the creator of Pink Bunny, I’m tempted to invoke copyright infringement!

Bre Pettis and Josh Leo will square off at We Are The Media for the first ever WATM speed vlog showdown. Come here to WATM to watch the competition at 3PM EST and High Noon PST!

Here’s how it will go down. There will be three rounds of competition. Bre will choose the criteria for the first movie, Josh will choose the criteria for the second movie, and for the final showdown they will choose a challenge from the audience together. They’ll each have 30 minutes to make, edit, compress, and upload their videos and make each post. Leave your speed-vlog challenge ideas in the comments below and watch them duke it out vlog-style!

Who will win??? You decide! Choose your favorite vlog entries and leave your comments. The vlogger with the most positive comments at 9 PM Pacific Time, will take home the title: WATM Speed Vlog Champion.

Update: Go vote!

I’ve got brand new 6th graders and I’m putting them through the paces. I’ve had them copying contour drawings upside down.

I have an important reason for giving this assignment. I want them to be able to draw what they see. It’s not an easy thing because the object has to be seen by the eyes, processed by the brain, visually measured on the paper and then the hand has to actually draw. In order to do this, the students must wrestle power away from their verbally focused left brains. The left brain loves to interpret objects and make them symbols. If the left brain had it’s way, everyone would draw a portrait like a smiley face. Interestingly enough, through testing it’s been found that the left brain is also the part of the brain that watches the clock and keeps track of time. I can’t tell you how many times the bell has rung this week and no-one in the room was expecting it because they were absorbed in their drawing.

I have three skills that students practice to develop their ability to document what they see on paper with a pen.
1. Go sloooooooooooooooooow. If you go to fast, you miss important details and the drawing loses it’s connection to the object.
2. Look back and forth from the object to your drawing a lot. Twice a second isn’t too much. Anything less than once a second is too slow to do the work of comparing your drawing to the object. The more time you can spend with your eyes on the object, the better!
3. Keep your object aligned with your paper. If you do this, the angles you are seeing will be the same angles you are drawing and you’ll have fewer problems with measurement.

I’ve been assessing them through observation. I walk around with a clipboard and watch how slow they draw, their eye movements, and paper alignment.

I’m happy to say that every single student has seen growth this week!

Sometimes when searching the internet for the latest and greatest in media news, I fall down a rabbit hole and have an internet adventure.

Today’s adventure started when my artist friend Greg Meyer sent me the link to presstube.com and with considerable effort that included right-clicking on links to open them in new windows, I found that presstube is the joint effort of three artists. I found a lot of cool video art on the site that appears to be updated regularly. It doesn’t look like a typical vlog because there’s no rss 2.0 feed with media enclosures, but it’s got regularly updated video content so it counts as a vlog in my book.

The site is run by James Paterson and he has his extremely cool video art piece entitled “Davy Jones Locker” opening at bitforms, which is the only art gallery in the universe focused exclusively on the digital arts. Bitforms was recently spotlighted in Wired and is also showing Daniel Rozin’s work. Rozin makes video monitors out of blocks of wood that change their angle to work as pixels. Utilizing a hidden camera, the wood rotates to change the amount of light reflected on them and makes it so that the viewer sees a huge wooden image of themselves.

Finding all these cool video artworks was so exciting. Going on video blog adventures and bringing the bounty back to you, my readers and subscribers, is my favorite part of reporting for We Are The Media! What video-blog adventures have you been on recently? Be sure and drop me a note or leave a comment and let me know!

Update: Dooser sent me this link to one of his Videos of the Woodblock thing at NYU. The sound it makes as it changes is really impressive. Thanks Dooser!

Jo and Kosso are very cool. They produce The Bluggcast which is a podcast by aliens reporting on human technology. They work for the Big and Beautiful Cats. Jennifer is also very cool, she works for Treehouse.

Memoir Guidelines From Mr. Pettis? 2nd Period L.A. Class:
? Have a catchy title. (Don?t give away the whole story in the title.)
? Use correct spelling and use quotes right.
? Show not tell. Paint a picture. Make the reader see it like a movie in their head.
? Include details and use specific examples.
? Describe the place and setting.
? Develop the character?s personality. Show who I am. The person telling the story needs to have some character so we know who they are and what they are like.
? Share my thoughts and feelings. Explain my thinking. Reflect on what happened.
? Flow.

I started wearethemedia.com in July, and I’m proud to say that it has grown to become an awesome team of vlogging reporters. There is so much potential in it, it makes me quiver with anticipation. Go over there and check it out asap and subscribe!