“HEY, YOU GUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYS!”

Oh, I am such a child of the 70’s when I tell you how much I loved The Electric Company growing up.  So hip.  And, according to this New York Times article, it will be back in January 2009.

Check out these vintage clips on the Electric Company Web site.  (I think they saved the best retro clips for the vintage DVD — where is the Volkswagen Beetle that runs on letters? The two faces in silhouette who sound out words?)

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Have you seen LookyBook, which has digitized children’s picture books that you can read online or … even embed in your Web site, wiki, or blog?  You can see thumbnails of every page, then click to buy the book.

I admit that I had to be nudged several times before looking at this site, but it is awesome!

While text-heavy picture books may have words that are too small to read on the screen, I can’t wait to try this site with a data projector.

I’m struggling a little bit to get a book to get the code to embed properly here (I am fighting the urge to scream, Why won’t Chicken Sunday show up in my blog?), but how cool would it be to read a book to lower elementary kids during Storytime, then tell them they can click on your block or Web site to see it again with parents?

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Do you have a PC computer with Windows Movie Maker? Did you know that you can make Claymation-type animations using your digital camera and Movie Maker that can help your students explore plot and sequencing? I wrote about this idea way back in the fall, and Michelle Levy and I spent some time creating a sample movie, worksheet, and tutorial. You can even download the photos if you don’t want to stage the movie yourself but just want to explore the technology.

While stop-motion/stop-action animation can help support student understanding in language arts, here’s a science spin on things: get an old digital camera (you know you’ve got some of those old floppy-disk cameras lurking in the Corner of Shame in your storage room) and mount it near your students’ plant experiments. Make sure you tape it in place so it can’t shift over time. Take a photo either once a day or once an hour over the course of the science experiment.

Then import those images into Movie Maker. (In Step 9, you might want to play with the default time length for each photo — maybe make it one second per image? — so that students have time to see each change.) Follow the rest of the instructions, and you’ll have the coolest science artifact around.

iMovie can create something quite similar. Though I haven’t been a Mac user in a while, it looks like iMovie even has a feature to speed up your video, which would give a more fluid result.

Follow these links to learn more.

Download the tutorial, with step-by-step instructions.

See the sample that Michelle and I made. Watch.

Plan your own animation using this worksheet.

Want to try to make the movie that we made? Download the photos here. **Warning - you will be downloading a huge — 20MB — zip file!**

For more on the history and stiles of stop-motion animation, the Wikipedia has a pretty nice entry on it.

And if you make a stop-motion or time-lapse video and post it online (or already have made one), will you leave us the URL in the comments below? (Comments are moderated, but it doesn’t take long for your comment to appear.)

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