6 Frame Comic Summaries

We’re asking you to take your favourite film and re-imagine it for us in the form of a comic, within a six-frame panel (download template files). That’s the whole film, condensed into six frames. This is another beautiful, reductionist way to analyze a book, historical figure, era, epoch or movement. I don’t see much use […]

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Calling E.T.

This is another one of those little things I love that the Internet brings me on a silver RSS platter1. From New Scientist As part of our special feature marking the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial life, we round up humanity’s radio messages to the stars. This is an awesome list of messages […]

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Weird Books

My favorite kind of edtech use- free, quick and slightly odd1. The Weird Book Room is, obviously, a collection of really odd book titles and covers2 This is prime fodder for all kinds of entertaining creative writing activities. Things I would want to try- Show the students three or four covers/titles. Their task is to […]

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Utter Nonsense

It’s all in the processing. Ask students to make sense out of what appears to be nonsense. Take the Ask A Ninja “What is podcasting?” episode. Does it seem like gibberish? For sure. Is there a very definite underlying logic? Without question and that logic can be explained. That’s the type of thing I’d start […]

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Wolverine Love Poems

I’ve been interested in using this Garfield Minus Garfield site for a while. Here are a few ways I might use it. Instant creative writing prompt- Write a love poem to a wolverine. Or write a love poem from the perspective of a wolverine. Or simply write a love poem using the word “wolverine” at […]

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The Future of Search

It has been interesting to see the excitement surrounding WolframAlpha . The new “Computational Knowledge Engine” called Wolfram|Alpha has gone through a full media cycle before it has even been unleashed on the world. It has been hyped as a “Google Killer” and denounced as snake oil, and we’re still at least a few days […]

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Simple Definitions, Complex Thoughts

Get them here or make up your own. You’ve got two ways to play this game. 1. Give these to your students as warm ups at various times but with one of the words blocked out and have them decide what it should be. 2. When they’ve got the hang of guessing, they start making […]

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Why it’s hard to stay interesting

Even the things that you think are pointing you to new material may be further mainstreaming you. Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which […]

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Bucket #3 – Leadership and Creativity

This is the final bucket from the earlier post on creativity. Leaders should talk last in meetings. Often the opposite occurs. The leader will lay out their vision and say “What do you think about that?” This frames the rest of the conversation. Even if you’re disagreeing, your argument is relative to that vision rather […]

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