For the last three months, Kate McKenzie (super-star teacher at Alice Jamieson Girls Academy) and I (engineer turned artist of Hidden Story Productions) have been working with sixty grade eight students on a unique learning project called Reel World Youth Documentaries (reelworldyouth.org).

We gave students the challenge of producing a short documentary about an inspiring figure in their community. It was taught as an integrated, cross-disciplinary course, and their finished video was to be shown at a public film festival.

If you have not had a chance to see this yet, please take the time.

It is a helpful overview of the movement and why it is working. Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges are a powerhouse interview. They give a great sense of where the movement is at.

This was previous to last nights actions re: the dismantling of OWS and the subsequent court injunction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C75sOJVN-tA

There is much to pay attention to!

I also appreciated these two articles when trying to explain the movement to some folks who were very much against it.

CHECK OUT THE PREVIEW VIDEO!!! This is our homage to Twisted Sister's Were Not Gonna Take It... with super extra help from Hidden Story Productions and many wonderful LC volunteers http://vimeo.com/31865343

Dear LC friends,
For the past year I have been working with a small and dedicated group of older adults who wanted to enhance their eldering capacities. Through a generous grant from New Horizons for Seniors, support from The City of Calgary Seniors Services & overwhelming support from this learning community, we went on a journey.

Here is an interesting article that highlights how easy it is to slip into mindset of test scores measuring educational success.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/26-14

I am guilty of this as anyone else being one of those who writes tests really well.

In this interview with Melissa Gates, although she starts by saying that test scores are not the only measure, she ends by saying essentially that good teaching is correlated with good test scores. But the research is flawed in a number of ways.