My Beauty Best Teacher

Teacher Dan Parker from Toronto, Ontario posted a class video called "Moonwalking on the Sun" about the challenges of being present in the classroom when your mind is moonwalking on the sun (with a hat tip tribute to Michael Jackson.) (Dan posted this on my Facebook page which is a place I go where people share things and I learn a lot.)

Some cool creativity here. So, the video isn't perfect "theorectically" for lots of educators whatever and some won't care for it, but it grew on me and I liked it. I'm actually singing this song to myself now as I write this.

The thing about is this - I bet their minds weren't moonwalking as they made this video. They look like they spent a ton of time on this AND ENJOYED IT. Do things the students enjoy. Bring them IN to the classroom.



Credits:
Rappers (in order of appearance): Warren, Fiz, Chris, Leo, Brian.
Narrator: Ed, AKA the Ice Cream Man.
Song production, vocals, video editing, coach: Mr. Parker.
Extra beat production: Stanley Bouchi-Lamontagne.
Community: Laurenhill Academy. Thanks to all those who appeared in the video, those who supported the hip hop battles, and a special shout out to Mr. Bilodeau, Ms Amarasekera and the LHA administration.

A far cry from the usefulness of the more mature Discovery Streaming, and yet this free educators website from National Geographic is going to be infinitely useful for educators.

Link: http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/edu/

They have done a good job of segmenting their views by audience. Teachers, Informal Educators, Families, Students, Kids all have their own view. This is smart.

They also have a lot of free tools for educators and a very interesting Geography Alliance to promote Geography literacy and some useful material on the Japanese earthquake.

The more non-fiction multimedia companies do to organize resources, share, and help those with common learning interests network - the better off we'll all be.