Happy Halloween from BrainPOP

I had the chance to speak with Allisyn Levy from BrainPOP Educators the other day. If you don't know about this community of BrainPOP-loving teachers then you're missing out on some great ideas for integrating BrainPOP into your classroom. It's definintely worth your time to sign up (free of course) and join in. Whether you're using BrainPOP, BrainPOP Junior, or BrainPOP en Espanol--which we make available at school and at home in my school district--you'l find that this is another example of how your personal learning community can be expanded by becoming involved in discussions with like-minded educators.

One of the great benefits of joining BrainPOP Educators is it gives you the ability to embed the featured movie of the month in your own web site. That's right! All you need to do is copy and paste the code provided to you after you request the snippet from BrainPOP and away you go. Try it! It's easy!

So, without further ado, here's this month's featured movie from BrainPOP, describing the origins of Halloween in the usual, goofy and fun way that Moby and Tim find to illustrate things. Good fun of course, but as always there's lots of solid curriculum material that you can expand into once your students have had their imaginations captured by this introduction. Enjoy!

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Four Contract Clause that Creatives Never See

A comment tossed of by my buddy Stephanie Sullivan in twitter this week gave me an idea for a new article on those contract clauses that are never explicitly stated when you work in a creative field, but seem to hold true none the less. My completed article is available now at CommunityMX.com.

Am I cynical about dealing with clients? Oh, maybe just a little, but after working in some creative field or the other for the last 20 years these unspoken attitudes on the part of my clients always seem to come up:

Clause 1: You will be expected to complete your work on time. We'll expect to pay you when we're darn good and ready.

Clause 2: Sorry, but we kind of think you're just an over-grown kid who plays around with stuff to make what we want. Our work is meaningful, yours is just a little frivolous.

Clause 3: Changes will be made often and will frequently be inconsequential, annoying, and frivolous. This is totally due to us not knowing exactly what we want. Get over it.

Clause 4: The customer is always right. Even when they make a mistake that you have to fix.


Got some more of your own! Feel free to post a comment here.

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Sending Out Some Love to Pandora and The Musical Genome Project

More and more these days I'm getting my music not from the radio or from my fairly extensive music library, but instead I'm listening to custom radio stations I created on my own using the free Pandora service. I've been plugged in and rocking to all sorts of great music beamed right to the iPhone using the free Pandora App and it's been way sweet.

Thing is, I'm such a geek that getting music I like from artists I've never heard of--all selected from an extensive database of songs that are categorized almost down to the molecular level isn't enough. I wanted to know how the music was selected and categorized. This is how the Music Genome Project describes its work:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level.We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

And what kind of music do I like? Check this description from one of the songs that was selected for me:

"We're playing this track because it features a vocal-centric aesthetic, a dynamic male vocalist, acoustic rhythm guitars a danceable groove, and other similarities identified in the Music Genome Project."

Cool! All I did was select one of my favorite artists, build a radio station from artists who have similar attributes and I'm rocking right out to great tunes. Free! So, here's a little love for Pandora. Check it out and buy lots of stuff from the advertising sponsors who keep the service free.

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New from the Palm Breeze Cafe: iTunes in Education (and Just in General)

My partner Lee Keller and I recently did a 4-part show on how iTunes can be used to manage your digital audio and video files. The show covers all of the basics of iTunes and Lee and I talk about how to do just about everything in iTunes, with our usual focus on how teachers, students, and parents might use the software. Here's the first of the four 9 minute snippets delivered from our school district's video on demand service:



If you're viewing from a location that allows access to YouTube here are the links to all four episodes:

iTunes Part 1: The iTunes Interface"

iTunes Part 2: Managing Your Library

iTunes Part 3: Playlists, Video, and More

iTunes Part 4: Finding and Subscribing to Podcasts

Hey! This is pretty good stuff! Enjoy!

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Good Move Tim Mahoney: Making Your Wife Join You in Your Perp Walk

For the life of me I can't figure out why any self-respecting woman would allow their husband to trot them out in front of the media when hubby has been caught in some dalliance with another woman. I mean, why would they *agree* to that? Long years of having to be subservient to a man with an out of control ego? I can only assume they've been conditioned to do, I don't know, "The Right Thing"?

At any rate, our local congressman is in the news due to an affair that he had with a campaign worker. Bad enough, but not only was he playing around with one woman, he had a second affair going on simultaneously. When Woman A finds out about Woman B she breaks things off, and Mr. Mahoney fires her as a result. That leads to a lawsuit, a $100,000.00 plus payoff, and the ultimate discovery of all of this by ABC News.

Mr. Mahoney's reaction? A press conference where his grief-stricken wife is supposed to sit next to him and show her support despite the "pain and embarrassment" that he's caused his family and a non-apology apology that says something about how his "family has issues like any other."

You know Tim, most families actually don't have issues like this, with one spouse seeking out multiple partners outside their marriage.

And most marriages are built on having enough respect for your spouse that you would protect them from public humiliation like you did with your wife.

So, Tim. All I can say is that when you decided to become a Democrat and run against Mark Foley you must not have paid close attention to the Democratic Party mascot.

It's a donkey Tim. Not an ass.

You however are an ass extraordinaire, and I hope that my neighbors toss that sorry donkey of yours right out of office.

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Sarah Six-Pack and Those Gosh Darn Fat Cats

Palm Beach County Florida, where I make my home, is the ultimate land of the fat cats. It's hard to imagine any greater concentration of wealth than what we have in our county here, so sometimes we have a little different perspective on things. Consider:

Palm Beach is home to old money that has flowed down to the progeny of people with names like Dodge and Ford and Rockefeller and Hutton and has mixed with all sorts of new money, like the Russian fertilizer gazillionaire who just bought a place on the beach from Little Donny Trump for a cool $100 million plus.

Down the coast a ways in Boca Raton we have all sorts of people who would like to live like the people in Palm Beach, but have only clawed their way partway up that ladder. Along with the doctors and lawyers and corporate officers who populate Boca we also have the greatest concentration of scam artists, crooks, and Internet hucksters in the U.S. Hey, look it up.

And then along the coast we have a smattering of people with LOTS of money, but no desire to be quite so gauche about the whole thing. They're happy on Jupiter Island to live quietly in the mega-mansions and to tool about on their sports yachts and spend time at the club. Tony, but refined describes places like Delray Beach, Ocean Ridge and Manalapan.

All of this money makes our county ripe for political fundraisers. And boy do we ever get them.

So it was no surprise when Sarah Palin recently visited for a fundraiser among the faithful down in Boca Raton.

But here's the thing that bugs me about our cute-as-a-button VP candidate. Can you say you're all about the Joe Six Packs and Hockey Moms out there and are absolutely shocked (SHOCKED!) at the behavior of those corporate fat cats and that you're Gonna Make Them Behave Themselves By Golly, while simultaneously patting them on the back and reaching into their wallets? Hmm, I guess the Joe Six-Packs she hangs out with can afford to spend $500.00 each to watch Sarah wink at them. After all, that's only about 60 six-packs to see Sarah. And for the truly devoted, you could also take the $50,000.00 a seat opportunity to attend the more intimate gathering that followed. Yeah, Hockey Moms can drop that kind of coin, no problem Don't Cha Know. And for those who missed it, here are a few quotes from the breathless attendees:

Dozens of starry-eyed Republican faithful and some of South Florida's wealthiest political elite joined Gov. Charlie Crist, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez and other Republican dignitaries in greeting the vice presidential nominee at the exclusive Boca Raton Resort and Club.

"All the heavyweights were there, it was electric," said event participant Yvonne Boice, president of the Boca Raton Republican Club. "I really truly feel she can be classified as the female Ronald Reagan."

"She's a rock star, and tonight she showed it," said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party.

My buddy Political Agnostic Rick would say "So? You expect a politician to behave differently?"

And you know, I do actually expect to hear a little truthiness from the people who would govern us. And when on the one hand you're trying to convince the average American that you're one of them, and that corporate fat cats ought to be hunted from the air like Alaskan wolves, well, Golly Gee Willikers, I think Sarah said it best herself:

“It comes down to one ticket’s proposal that can be trusted, and another ticket’s proposal to deal with some of these issues and maybe questioning the truthfulness and the intention there. I think it’s very relevant there.”

Yeah Button. I'm down with you on that one girl. Give us a wink won't you?

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Keeping Your Lists Online With TaDaList.com

The amazing Lee Kolbert and the astounding Jamey Akien are really coming into their own in the technology TV show that we produce in our school district. We share these videos internally with a dedicated media server and externally via YouTube, in addition to delivering the show via cable.

Lee is the High Priestess of Web 2.0 around here--always coming up with new practical and educational uses for the Web 2.0 tools that are available out there. In this episode from our show, she discusses with Jamey the ways that you could use TaDaList.com for personal and classroom lists, and how to share those lists online.

Gosh, they do an *awesome* job here. I'm just so proud. (sniff)

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