Wrap It Up! Youth video interviews with mural artists

Mural design using archeological artifacts (cow bones for soups and porcelain bowl fragments). Artifacts are from dig site from within the fence area.

QR codes on mural wrap will link to videos hosted on Next Vista for Learning.

A youth video project will launch in the fall that will engage San Jose Japantown youth in interviewing 30 or so local mural artists. The collaborative mural will be a digital fence wrap on the fence bounding Jackson, 6th, Taylor and 7th Street. On the project site, http://wrapitupmurals.weebly.com/ , I am slowly building out the project and lesson plans.

Wrap It Up! Youth video interviews embedded into murals

A few weeks ago, I was awarded a Donor Circle for the Arts grant to engaging middle school students in a community mural project in San Jose's Japantown. The project, Wrap It Up!, now has a website to document the project process: http://wrapitupmurals.weebly.com/  The project will result in student created video interviews with mural artists which will be hosted on Next Vista for Learning. The project will also invite students to create visual art to add to the mural site and spoken word and poetry recordings. All video and audio recordings will be incorporated into the mural project via QR codes. An earlier posting on the project concept is here.

Creative Compositions Student and Teacher Video Project

I created this logo about a month ago for the Creative Compositions Contest project and it is in full swing now. I have been burning the midnight oil these last few days uploading student and teacher created videos to the education non-profit site, Next Vista for Learning, a free online library of youth curriculum videos created by and for students everywhere.  Submissions are coming from all over the United States: Indiana, California, Hawaii and Michigan, to name a few. It is really inspiring to be a part of a project that invites students to creatively teach subject matter using digital video technology, their imagination and knowledge.  Here are the videos uploaded so far (47) and the submissions keep coming in. I have maybe twenty more to upload from today. There is also a teacher strand in this project. The contest deadline is November 11th: http://www.nextvista.org/tag/creativecompositions/

More information in the contest at the contest guidelines page.

Creative Compositions Student Video Contest!

The Next Vista Creative Compositions Student Video Contest has launched!

Deadline to enter is November, 11th 2011.
What is Next Vista for Learning? 

"Next Vista works to make learning more engaging, with a focus on helping students start strong with any topic they study. Its central project is a free, online library of teacher- and student-made short videos for learners everywhere. Next Vista believes a strong four-minute video could save students days or weeks of frustration by providing a variety of presentations on the topics that give them trouble."

Student Film Festival Logo Design

One of the projects I have been working this week is logo design. I have not done this in a long time and it was quite fun to work up pencil sketches and digital designs. The designs are for student video contests hosted by Next Vista for Learning. I thought film strip imagery and fruit imagery symbolic of where judging was taken place would be fitting. Here are a few initial sketches below and above are the more final digital sketches. The treble clef is for an upcoming student video contest which will be judged at a Tennessee educational conference in November.