Media Monday: Summer camps where young cinephiles can shine

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Whether we love it, hate it, or just dread the crowds, we all know that the creative explosion of SXSW is a defining event in Austin. In the lead-up to the 2017 marathon of events, I thought I’d look atwhat kids who are inspired by the film, music, and comedy festivals can do to take the leap and become active creatives themselves. After the professionals take down their screens, unplug their amps, and fold up their boxes of props, where can your kid go to learn more?

First up: Possibilities for young filmmakers in Austin. All these programs are currently open for registration for the summer.

  • Your go-to site for information about Summer Camps for aspiring filmmakers is Summer @Austin Public. This organization is run by the Austin Film Society and allows kids to work with local filmmakers on live-action and animated projects, as well as TV shows. Camp themes include comedy, action-adventure, special effects, sci-fi/fantasy, and more. The kids don’t have to have any prior experience and don’t have to bring their own equipment—it’s all provided.
  • UT Film and Media Youth Camps are offered during spring break and during the summer by the university’s Department of Radio-Television-Film. They take place right on campus. Animation and claymation, screenwriting, and documentary filmmaking are some of the topics on offer this year. HURRY! Discounts for summer end March 3!
     
  • Austin School of Film has two-week Youth Summer Film Camps in June, when students ages 9 to 12 and 13 to 18 get a chance to learn a variety of techniques. Kids produce their own projects and screen the final product at the end.

If you know of more programs for young screenwriters, directors, costumers, or other cinemaniacs, please let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list!

And if your son or daughter is interested in filmmaking, consider attending the screening of the Youth Animation & M.A.F.I.A. films on March 14, 2017 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.  You'll see films created by kids ranging from 8 to 18 years old, and all made in under 24 hours.

Next week we’ll look at music camps, and as the festival begins, we’ll explore the world of comedy and improv for kids who want to take the stage.


Shelley Sperry

Media Monday: On the trail of civil rights in Texas

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This week many schools will honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with activities, readings, and projects related to the struggle for racial equality. For this Media Monday, I decided to look for some not-quite-so-well-known civil rights stories based in Texas. Families can visit some historic sites and learn the history together, or students may want to use the stories of these Texas struggles as jumping-off points for their own projects.

Juanita Craft, Texas civil rights hero

Juanita Craft, Texas civil rights hero

  • Austin’s African-American Cultural Heritage District includes a wide variety of sites that students can visit and explore, from the Carver Museum (in what used to be the segregated African American branch of the Austin Library system) to the Texas State Cemetery, where many civil rights leaders are buried.
  • The Dallas home of Juanita Craft  is preserved as a tribute to a woman who started an astonishing 182 NAACP chapters and helped integrate universities, theaters, restaurants, and other public spaces in Texas.
  • Bessie Coleman, an “aviatrix” and the first African American to earn a pilot’s license, has an exhibit dedicated to her at the Atlanta Historical Museum in an old railroad depot full of many other history exhibits in Atlanta, Texas.
  • Calaboose African American Museum in San Marcos was formerly a jail, then a USO dance hall for black soldiers, and now features stories of African Americans in Texas, from the era of the Buffalo Soldiers to the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Starr County Farm Workers’ Strike originated in Rio Grande City as part of a labor movement organized by the National Farm Workers Association in the 1960s, protesting low wages and brutal working conditions. The protests culminated on Labor Day 1966 with a march on the State Capitol in Austin.


We all know that Austin has truly amazing, world-class collections related to Texas history, African American culture, and civil rights at the Bullock Museum and the LBJ Presidential Library, and our kids are lucky to have those resources so close at hand. But I also want to point out just a few additional resources for learning Texas history that helped me find some of the stories above:


Shelley Sperry
 

Media Monday: If it’s fake, it ain’t news you can use

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For many years, I worked as a fact-checker for a magazine with high standards for accuracy and fairness, so for me, one of the most galvanizing and frightening trends of 2016 has been the spread of inaccurate and/or misleading “news” via websites and social media. I believe there’s not much that’s more important than getting the facts right, so I am thrilled that teaching young people—including elementary school students—to hold the media to high standards and to fact-check what they watch and read for themselves is a growing trend in schools.

In November, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Learning,” a study from Stanford University, looked at how well middle school, high school, and college students understand whether they are looking at facts, opinions that are biased, advertisements, or absolute falsehoods online. The results were pretty discouraging. For example, in a survey of more than 200 middle-school students, the researchers found:

More than 80% of students believed that the native advertisement, identified by the words “sponsored content,” was a real news story. Some students even mentioned that it was sponsored content but still believed that it was a news article. This suggests that many students have no idea what “sponsored content” means and that this is something that must be explicitly taught as early as elementary school.

For many educators in the alternative ed community, the development of robust powers of analysis and critical thinking among their students is a foundation of the curriculum. Whether they rely on classical models like the Socratic method of interrogation or harness new digital technologies, the goal is to enable kids to navigate the murky depths of all the false, manipulative, and downright crazy information online so they can form educated opinions and contribute to civic and scientific conversations themselves.

One interesting effort, recently highlighted by NPR, is the National Literacy Project’s “Checkology” program, adopted in a few high schools in pilot form, and rolling out more widely in 2017. Checkology will initially be provided free to teachers who want to test the program.  The interactive, self-paced activities are designed to teach kids how to assess the validity of many types of information.

As highlighted recently by Bill Moyers’s PBS TV show, the Center for News Literacy offers a great toolbox for parents, educators, and students who want to improve their ability to see information more objectively. Teens might be interested in the six-week free online course starting January 9, 2017, called Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens.

For a little more information on what could very well be the essential topic in civics education for a long time to come, check out:


Shelley Sperry

 

The whole world in one Houston school

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If you’re feeling in need of a tonic right now—something to nourish and pep you up and get you through the end of the year with a smile on your face—I have a suggestion. Have you seen the Houston episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on CNN?

The full episode celebrates the gorgeous, charming, and fascinating people of Houston, including hip hop car enthusiasts, Vietnamese fishermen and shopkeepers, Congolese and Ghanaian urban farmers, Mexican American families, and a larger-than-life Indian American radio host. But for the Alt Ed Austin community, the most inspiring visit Bourdain made down in Houston was to Margaret Long Wisdom High School (formerly known as Robert E. Lee High School). Principal Jonathan Tranh, a Vietnamese immigrant himself, led a tour of “the most diverse high school” in a city where minorities are now the majority. At Wisdom HS, 80 percent of students speak English as a second language, and dedicated ESL instructor Gary Reed is one of the keys to the kids’ future success.

Suffering through a typical cafeteria lunch of chicken sandwiches, fries, and canned fruit salad, Chef Bourdain spoke to students from Iran, Pakistan, Burkina Faso, and El Salvador. You’ll love the little glimpses of these students’ dreams of engineering, fashion design, and soccer—and be sobered by the knowledge that so many of them come from dangerous places to which they dare not return. There’s one theme that’s repeated in every segment of the episode, in every corner of Houston, where each person interviewed praises the city’s compassion, climate, and boundless opportunity: “Welcome to America.”

If you have cable, you can probably see Bourdain’s episode “on demand,” and if not, it’s available on the CNN app, and for purchase on many platforms.


Shelley Sperry
 

Media Monday: Locals we love

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Did you Buy Local for your Halloween pumpkin this year? Are you giving out local Lamme’s next week—or at least buying some for yourself? Good. Now, how about some local video and audio fun for you and your kids?

Here are two truly terrific homegrown, certified local, and maybe even organic things to try this week:
 

ARTtv is a YouTube channel that wants your kids to do just one thing: MAKE SOME ART! The channel is the brainchild of Ron Pippin, an Austinite with 25 years of experience in film and video production. The topics on this vast channel of mostly kid-made videos include mini lessons on all sorts of skills and projects, from drawing faces to writing poetry about bats to making an automaton. Plus lots and lots of great music by and for kids.
 


ARTtv is connected to Outside Voice, a creative community for kids that you can help fund through Indiegogo. You can find out more about Outside Voice on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

 

Tumble is a podcast for kids ages 8 to 12 about every aspect of SCIENCE! But honestly, I’m five times older than that target demographic, and I’m adding it to my playlist today. The hosts are partners in life and on the podcast. Lindsay Patterson and Marshall Escamilla love trivia, cool and gross stories, and dumb puns.  But mostly they love science.

In episodes that last about 15 minutes each, Lindsay and Marshall share fascinating facts about salamanders, electricity, and exploding stars.  As with most podcasts, the thing that will keep you coming back is the chemistry (!) of the hosts, who ask sharp, interesting questions of their scientist guests and do a lot of giggling. And if you end up loving it like I do, there’s also a newsletter you can subscribe to and a way to support the podcast through Patreon. Follow Tumble on Facebook and on Twitter.


Shelley Sperry

 

Media Monday: Apps for the budding naturalist

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About this time last year, researchers from the UK and Brazil published an article lamenting the lack of great nature study apps. From their point of view, the powerful tools of phones and tablets weren’t being used to their best advantage for citizen science projects. The truth is, there probably are a million ways to take advantage of our devices’ abilities to measure location, light, altitude, and to take photos, videos, and audio—and there will be many new nature study apps in coming years. But right now, students of all ages can find a decent variety of apps to help us learn about the natural world.

There are apps for geology, astronomy, climate, zoology, botany—you name it. For this post, I’ve done a quick survey of some of the most fun and helpful apps for kids who want to study animals and participate in citizen science projects. Most are free—so give them a try!

WWF Together wins my vote for most adorable and irresistible of the animal apps. The app brings users stories about endangered species, with interactive features using origami and incorporating your own selfies. I used it on an iPhone, but I assume it would be even more stunning on a larger iPad screen.
FREE; iOS and Android

I was surprised to see how many apps in the app stores are labeled “Montessori.” Nature-oriented apps designed for little ones include two that look especially worthwhile: Montessori Approach to Zoology—Vertebrates and Montessori Approach to Zoology—Invertebrates. They include matching puzzles and help kids learn to categorize animals by characteristics.
$2.99-$3.99; iOS only (but other Montessori-based apps are available on Android)

Audubon, as you might expect, puts out a lovely range of apps for both iPhone and iPad, including its Audubon Bird Guide: North America, with stunning photos for over 800 species. Probably best for older kids, the app allows users to keep their own lists of sightings and listen to tweets, caws, and all kinds of other bird sounds.
FREE; iOS and Android

Merlin Bird ID is another great birding app, from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. It’s quite interactive, asking the user questions to help narrow down the type of bird, and includes bird sounds and photos.
FREE; iOS and Android

For kids, one of the first “citizen science” apps was connected to the online Project Noah, which allows users to share photos and video of plants and animals. Unfortunately, the app is only available via iOS and hasn’t been updated since 2012.

iNaturalist, on the other hand, also allows you to record what you see and share with others, and it looks great for older kids. What’s even better for Austin kids? The iNaturalist makers have also created Texas Nature Trackers, specifically focused on our state’s wildlife and plants. Check this one out for sure!
FREE; iOS and Android


Shelley Sperry