US Film Students Draw With Light

Upper School students in Mr. Gaines film & video course recently produced a series of still images in which they used shutter speed effects and Adobe software to draw with light. These images are currently on display as large prints in the hallway adjacent to the theater...

Middle School drama class video chats with school in Tanzania

Ms. Crewdson's class is starting a collaborative project with a school in Tanzania. Students met and chatted with their counterparts and even shared some songs.

Videoconferencing with the school in Morocco

An 8th grade Arabic class partners with a school in Morocco. Through several video-conferencing sessions (using Skype) the students learn about each other’s cultures. Later in the semester the class will write a play in Arabic, while the school in Morocco writes a play in English. Students will exchange plays and perform them for each other via video-conference.

Sophomores Welcome Freshmen

The "sophomore guides" group created this welcome video for freshmen!

Knightly News Season 2 Episode 4: Thanksgiving special!

Published on Nov 24, 2015

What are you thankful for Buckaneers?
In this episode:
-Nate anchors

Check out the Latest from the Knightly News

Published on Nov 13, 2015

George gets resurrected.
Freshmen vs. Sophomores.
The anchors attempt to do a segment on Debate Club.
Break the Egg!

Starring Mitch, Pavel, Rose, Sam, and Ally,
Tune in for the next episode the monday after Thanksgiving

Extra! Extra! Watch all about it! Knightly News off to a great start with Season 2

BB&N students are at it again!  Season 2 of the Knightly News is off to a great start.  Check out episodes 1 and 2 below:

Published on Oct 16, 2015

WE'RE BACK FOR A SECOND SEASON. This episode stars Mitchell Papazian, boy wonder, and the tangy-citrus flavor of Pavel Frantsen.

Published on Oct 30, 2015

A Knightly News halloween special! Featuring murder, intrigue, and Ahcene!

Upper School Launch Grant: Experimenting with Instructional Mathematics Videos

Video, as an instructional tool, is on the rise in recent years.   I used my launch grant to learn methods of making instructional videos for the mathematics classes that I teach and how to organize those resources.  In this blog, I will describe three different types of screencasting software and how I created my Google site.

So, which screencasting software is best?  It depends on your comfort level with video-editing software, and how much time you want to spend making your screencasts look professional.  Here’s my opinion of three particular types:

1.  Explain Everything

Explain Everything in an inexpensive app (currently $2.99) only available on an iPad or iPhone.  I never experimented with this software on an iPhone, because I don’t think that the screen is large enough.  In fact, I don’t actually find the screen big enough on an iPad for most of the educational videos that I wish to record.  But if the videos that you want to make don’t need a large screen and if you are comfortable on an iPad, Explain Everything is a very easy piece of software to use.  It records on-screen drawing, annotation, and audio through the iPad microphone.  Exporting your videos is simple.  For a teacher that is an iPad user and wants to begin making videos, I would highly recommend Explain Everything.

2.  Camtasia

Camtasia is available on either a Mac or a PC, but for a cost.  It is a very powerful software product though, and will allow you to do almost everything you would want to do in an educational screencast.  You can record through the webcam or the screen, add clickable links throughout the video, and easily share videos on YouTube.  The possibilities are actually a little overwhelming for the novice videographer.  I would recommend Camtasia only for teachers with some screencasting experience and demanding of a professional result.

My Camtasia Example Video

3.  Screencast-O-Matic

It’s free!  I think it also looks professional.  Both Mac and Windows users can run this software on their computer.  You can have it record your webcam or your screen.  I found it to be rather easy to use and make small edits.  It’s simple to upload videos directly to YouTube or save videos to your computer as an mp4 file.  I think that Screencast-O-Matic offers the optimum combination in terms of features, ease of use, and price.   I highly recommend this software to any teacher who is starting out in screencasting and wants more screen space or edibility than an iPad offers.

My Screencast-O-Matic Example Video

My Google Site

This past year I found that I needed to organize all my online resources in one central location.  My created Google site contains websites that I found to be valuable, instructional videos for different topics, and mathematics software programs, such as graphing calculators.  It also includes suggested follow-up questions to ask students once they have completed watching certain educational videos.  When I have experimented with the flipped classroom approach to teaching, I found it critical to ask my students follow-up questions to videos watched for homework so that I could be sure that they actually watched it and learned something.

My examples of videos with follow up questions

I have learned so much through this launch grant and had fun playing with new technology.  If anyone has questions about making or implementing instructional videos, I would be happy to help!

-Mariah Napeñas

Art on Display at the Upper School

The Art Department is at it again! The Gallery Talks last Thursday evening were a huge success and a lovely way to hear from student artists about the process of creating their pieces. Congrats to the Art Department on creating such a lovely evening and for putting up the Winter Student Art Show! And, a special thank you to Lanie for acting as the emcee for this event! The students that spoke about their art work included: Alex Evenchik (Ceramics), Ezra Burstein (Ceramics), Callie Costello (Advanced Painting and Drawing), Julie Peng (Introduction to Painting and Drawing), Peter Mankiw (Introduction to Painting and Drawing), Marin Lang (Advanced Photography), Emma Rashes (Introduction to Photography), Alex Fecteau (Design and Architecture), Kofi Yankey (Woodworking), and David Nazemi (Woodworking).
-from Katrina Fuller's Thursday Announcements and Reminders

Thanks to Andrew Warren, we now have a video playing on a loop in the faculty lounge as well as on the TV screen outside of the theater.  We have five videos of students talking about their art work at the winter student art show followed by three student-made music videos, produced for Warren's year-long"film and video" course.

Video as a medium of expression

Video is an engaging medium which can tell a story, illustrate a concept, or enrich instruction. Videos can be included in class websites or as evidence of learning.  Here are some examples of teachers and students experimenting with the use of video at BB&N...

As a celebration of Spanish language, and leading up to the Hispanic Heritage Dinner, Upper School teacher Profesora Sánchez-Gómez created a video asking students and faculty members of Hispanic origin about their favorite Spanish word.



Here is an example of a video some students threw together in advance of homecoming...

6th Grade Glogster and QR Code project

Glogster is a tool that allows your students to make interactive online posters by mixing images, text, music and video.

This year the 6th grade French and Spanish students are using Glogster to complete their MFA ACTion (Arts, Culture, and Technology) projects. All students visit the MFA, and in art class they choose a painter and a painting for a master study.  In French and Spanish classes the students research their painters and paintings to create interactive online posters. Using Glogster, students are able to embed video clips and insert images of their artists and their paintings as well as audio clips of music from the artists' time periods.  Lastly, students can use Glogster to record their own voices in their target languages.  Each glog results its own unique URL.  During technology class, students will turn their URLs into QR codes, and on Sunday, May 13th, the student paintings will be hung on the MFA walls along with the QR codes linking the students' physical artwork to their interactive glogster posters, accessible online via iPads and smartphones.

Below are a few examples of student projects:

Frank Weston Benson

Salvador Dali

John Singer Sargent

If you are interested in learning more about Glogster in the classroom, check out Glogopedia to see sample projects to get ideas on how Glogster could be useful to your students.

For more information on QR codes in the classroom, please see:

Edutopia- Using QR Codes in the Classroom

Edutopia- 12 Ideas for Teaching with QR Codes

The Thinking Stick

Vocab Grabber: an Amazing Online Text Analysis Tool

Try VocabGrabber today! -

IT'S PRETTY AMAZING ...

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save... read more and try it now now!

I grabbed some text from today's CNN headlines, pasted into VocabGrabber and Voila! CLICK on the image above to see the results OR Try VocabGrabber with one of sites samples:

• United States Bill of Rights
• Oliver Twist: Chapters I and II
• Science Text: What is a Genome?

What is Blended Learning?

Q: What is Bended Learning?

A: Blended Learning refers to a mixing of different learning environments. The phrase has many specific meanings based upon the context in which it is used. Blended learning gives learners and teachers a potential environment to learn and teach more effectively.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blended Learning Global Education Conference 2010

Posted by Mike Gwaltney on November 9, 2010

Watch these 2 videos from Carpe Diem and Millis High to start to imagine the possibilities of what blended-learning schools do in helping their students achieve stellar results with models that increase productivity and personalize learning

Is school the place where students get information?

Diana Laufenberg teaches 11th-grade American History at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. In this TED talk video she shares 3 surprising things she has learned about teaching -- including a key insight about learning from mistakes.


What do you think? Please leave a comment!

Remix Culture, Fair Use and Online Tools for Capturing Audio and Video Content From the Internet

Q: What is Remix Culture?

A: Making new stuff from the existing stuff

Center for Social Media resources:

• Fair Use Question of the Month
• Code of Best Practices in Fair -Use for Creating Video, Documentary, Poetry, Remix Culture
• Examples of Successful Fair Use in Documentary Film
• Did These Mashups Use "Fair Use"? You Decide! Ten grad students used the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video to try to create "fair use" mash-up videos. Take a look at the videos and decide how well (or not) they did!

This video explains why the Code for Fair-Use in Online Video got created, and how the Code can help you create online videos that employ fair use of copyrighted material.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creativity. Creative Commons can help you find photos, music, text, books and educational materials.

Tools for Capturing Video and Audio Content From the Internet

• Media Converter converts your audio and video files from your hard disk, by url/stream (http,ftp, mms,rtsp) or directly from websites like Facebook or Youtube

• Listen to youtube your best source for converting YouTube to MP3. You can convert unlimited YouTubevideos to MP3 for FREE.

• Video2Mp3 allows you to convert and download YouTube videos to MP3 file online.

• Screencast-O-Matic is the original online screen recorder for one-click recording from your browser on Windows, Mac, or Linux with no install for FREE!

• Sketchcasting allows you to record a sketch with or without voice, explain something, have fun, or create art. Then embed the sketch player in your blog or point people to your sketch channel.

Best of TED

TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) is a conference held at various times and places around the world that hosts some of the most fascinating talks from some of the most amazing individuals from across the world. Tickets to TED are highly prized, but luckily for the world, the organizers put all of the presentations up on their website (www.ted.com) for the whole world to see.

There are literally thousands of talks on the website, so I've decided to share some of my own personal favorites with this forum. For my opening post, I've gone with one of my all-time favorites by Hans Rosling, a professor in global health. I love this for several reasons: He asks us to re-assess our understanding and use of the word "Third-world" when we think about countries around the world, he does an incredible job of demonstrating what good data analysis can do, he walks us through a wonderful online tool at www.gapminder.org, and he makes it all so much fun.

I hope you enjoy!

Kara Oehler - Mapping Main Street USA Project

KNBC club at the Middle School, had a pleasure to welcome Kara Oehler, an independent audio producer at Mapping Main Street USA Project. Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. Kara told the kids how in May, 2009 the Mapping Main Street team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit USA Main Streets. In the process, they took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. They have talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches.

Since then 700 Main Streets have documented. Anyone can contribute to this project. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States.

We are looking forward to documenting our own Main Street here in Cambridge and organizing a KNBC field trip in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for our updates!

MS KNBC media club makes music videos

The Middle School KNBC club has started the year off making mashup music videos. They used the meez.com website, garageband, iMovie, and screencasting software. Below are some sample videos created by the students:

CSPAN 6-12 Student Video Competition

C-SPAN's StudentCam is an annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think seriously about issues that affect our communities and our nation. Students are asked to create a short (5-8 minute) video documentary on a topic related to the theme: “Washington, DC - Through My Lens”
Tell us about an issue, event, or topic that helped you better understand the role of the federal government in your life or community.

President Obama discussing the importance of the CSPAN competition:


10th grader Sawyer Bowman made the following 2009 winning video "Cancer: It's Personal"