Lights, Camera . . . Engagement! Three Great Tools for Classroom Video

How many times have you thought to yourself, "In what way can I spice up this unit and make it student-centered?" One great way is to let your students be creative using video. With all the tools and technology available, making videos is easier than ever for you and your students. Recently at the annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, Becky Ellis, Greg Kulowiec and I presented three different ways you can use video with your students in the classroom. Below is the slide show we used to introduce these tools: There are plenty of ideas and resources available through the links we shared. 1. Step A: Sign Up Animoto is an easy-to-use website where you and your students can create 30-second videos for free. Step B: Try It Yourself, Then Show Your Students The great thing about Animoto is that all you have to do is follow the easy steps they provide. Step C: Share with Your Classes Students really enjoyed watching and presenting their videos. 2. Shoot the video. Step A

Building to the Sky: Flying Robots Take on Architecture In the future, robots will do literally everything for us (if we have anything to say about it). So why not build our office buildings, apartment towers and single-family homes? A small fleet of flying robots recently built a scale model of a building using Styrofoam bricks and a complex navigation system. Conceived by a team of architects, the Flight-Assembled Architecture project was an exercise in design and in technology. The small quadrocopters were programmed with the coordinates of the room they were in and the locations of the bricks they were expected to put into place. The tiny team of robots built their unusual structure at the FRAC Center in Paris before an amused crowd in December 2011. The structure is meant to be a 1:100 scale model of a conceptual vertical village. If this type of technology can be adapted for use in real-life situations, prefabricated homes and other buildings could be simply airlifted into place with the use of “smart” robots.