Tag Archives: Star Wars

Wrapping up Book Week

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A few months ago, I did a presentation to the MANTLE Teacher Librarians’ Conference in Newcastle about creating book trailers and digital stories. As part of the preparation, a series of space and science fiction related digital photos had been newly uploaded to Photo Peach (“Here’s one I prepared earlier…” again) and I was able to demonstrate how images could be easily moved, duplicated or deleted in the editing process.

During the presentation, members of the audience suggested a few possible captions, in keeping with Book Week’s “Read Across the Universe” theme, and my intention was to get the Stage 3 students, back at school, to complete the brainstorming of the rest of the captions during Book Week. As the events of that week overwhelmed us, I filed away the groups’ A3 planning sheets, but dug them out again this week – and was thrilled with their results.

As promised, here is the finished slideshow:


Read across the universe by 5/6E

and an additional set of bookish/SF images that got the students’ conversations going:


Book Week 2013

A reminder to those on iPads: the latest version of Flash is required, so you’ll need to use a regular computer to see Photo Peach slideshows.

By the way, we found “Robot jokes” during a Google search:
boyslife.org/about-scouts/merit-badge-resources/robotics/19223/robot-jokes/

and we were surprised to find that there are interactive “Yoda speech generator” sites (it started out as a joke that there might be one – and there were several!), such as:
www.yodaspeak.co.uk/

And this just in: the Tuesday Library Book Club at Wyong High School was inspired by my presentation at MANTLE and spent some time with their teacher librarian, Ms Murray, making claymation figures to create an Animoto audiovisual to celebrate Book Week 2013 and its theme HERE. Wow!

May the CPR be with you…

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StarWars

Of all the nights to have an extra staff meeting thrown into the mix! The staff at my school had to update our Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Care certification before the end of term and, of course, it fell on the same school night as the free teacher preview of “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination”.

The Lucasian gods must have been smiling upon me. It was explained that the order of the 24 of us doing the practical test on the CPR mannequins would be by lot. There were two examiners. What were my chances of getting away early enough to still attempt getting into the city in time? I was one of the last to select a number and it was… #2!

I was able to perform my test, then race for the train station. An express country train was due, so I ended up at the Powerhouse 30 minutes later, at only a few minutes past 6pm.

As I approached the museum, there was a wonderful photo opportunity: a pair of stormtroopers menacing people passing through the automatic doors. But the drinks were being served – and the (understandably) thirsty guards disappeared inside just as I raised my iPhone. Oh well.

The exhibition is excellent. Not only is it a great display of impressive props, costumes, robots and vehicles from the extensive “Star Wars” universe, but parallels have been drawn to modern-day science fact and speculative science theory-soon-to-be-fact-one-day. Advances in bionic limbs, robotics, hover vehicles, faster-than-light colony vessels, etc, were all represented, with many clever hands-on activities.

I had to admire the layout this time. The exhibit is on two levels – and its circuitous path took attendees through the “Star Wars” souvenir shop twice!