Electric Chalk » film

CP3 Conference – resources available

Chris — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:07:39 +0000

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

Film Education – new website

Chris — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:05:56 +0000

I’m in danger of turning into a Film Education/CP3 fanboy but I do quite like the look of this…

At BETT Film Education relaunched their website, redesigned to make it more accessible and more flexible. It has loads of great resources online for analysing films using clips and other multimedia. Thanks to their strong links to the film industry the films they examine are right up to the minute. Slumdog Millionaire is the latest.

The resources are suitable for levels from KS2-A level and are well worth a look.

The website is delivered in partnership with the South East Grid for Learning.

Animoto – turn photos into cool slideshows

Chris — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:57:04 +0000

Another one for the resource directory…

Are you keen to get away from endless PowerPoints and uninspiring slideshows?

Animoto has been making waves for some time now. This is a great tool for taking a selection of still images and turning them into a professional-looking multi-media slideshow. Once you have an account it’s fairly straightforward to upload your gifs or jpegs, add text and then pick music (either your own or from their library)

Animoto then stitches them together with cool animations and you can embed, email or download as an mp4. For a fee you can get the results at DVD quality.

Here’s an example I put together. The pictures in themselves are pretty dull, they’re from a project we did on the anti-social behaviour and the built environment, but it gives you idea what can be done. It tok me about 10 minutes to make.

They have got a dedicated mini-site for education users which gives free access to just about everything for a limited period (6 months I think) so a class can access it. Check out the Learn More link for further details.

Great for creating visual interest getters, discussion starters for teachers. For students, a great way of presenting work in subjects right across the curriculum.

Loads of potential!

Film Education conference

Chris — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:32:58 +0000

If you’re involved in media in schools (and not just as a media teacher) you should seriously consider pleading with the person who holds the purse strings to get you on next year’s CP3 Conference.

Run by Film Education, it was in Brighton last week, Leicester the year before and York in 2006 and I’ve been on all of them, presenting a short slot this year.

They get some really good keynote speakers but it’s really the workshops and the final group task that make the event. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you want to know about how to run media projects across the curriculum.

Check out their website. I’ll flag it up again when they advertise for 2009.