Video and Audio Sites

This was such a fun exploration! I searched on You Tube for library themes and laughed until I was crying at several. I particularly liked the one with Mr. Bean at the library. I really think this could be such a fun way to teach what NOT to do with books. There was another video called No Cookies in the Library (Sesame Street). Cute! I have tried many ways of teaching book care and it's so difficult to make something stick. Perhaps spaced repetition of the concepts with these videos would help. Can we get You Tube through our district's filter? Hmmm.....
But I absolutely loved the Animoto where you can put pictures into a slide video with music. I've already done this once and can think of lots of applications in school as well as home. I think this would be a great promotion tool.
We have a theme each year school wide and the principals wanted it to be Mission Possible (a take on Mission Impossible). I have been racking my brain to come up with suitable ways to promote this theme. I thought I would utilize some of the applications we learned about to make up "agent" identification cards. But this morning I finished a great book about the Apollo 11 space walk team, called Team Moon. It's a Texas Bluebonnet nominee for 2008. I read all of the nominations over the summer and had put this one off because it looked like a snoozer. To my surprise, I was so very inspired. Throughout the narrative about how the mission came to be and was executed, the theme of teamwork was just blaring. The author told of all of the components necessary for this mission to work, all of the potential problems, all of the actual problems and how this mission came off miraculously. Every teacher and student should read this book and learn about team work, but also how each of the 400,000 contributors were responsible for the success or failure of the project. Bravo!!!!!
Lots of podcasts available. I enjoyed finding out how this works. Found one site that I subscribed to called Rachel's Reviews. I'm not sure that it will be a great tool for future purposes, but it was fun and perhaps it will prove useful. I think that the whole idea of sooooo many podcasts available will make them less used by me. To find exactly what I'm looking for to add to my curriculum might be dicey. Maybe at some point, I'll be able to create one if I collect the right tools. Again....how much of this will be available through our district filter?????