The final part of my plenary/keynote paper at this year’s IASL conference is going to be about reading video i.e. do we teach our students how to “read” a video i.e. view, understand, interpret and evaluate what they see on the screen? Or do we just assume that because they watch TV or view video online, they can view video in a critical manner? One of the ways to get students to be critical viewers of video is a) to get them to watch videos and b) to allow them to create their own. Stuart King, from Eltham College, wrote an interesting paper for this year’s ASLA Online Conference in which he argued that the policy of many schools – state and private – of banning YouTube was mistaken. If you don’t have access to the ASLA Online Conference Papers, check out the article in the Sydney Morning Herald. Obviously, there is some material on YouTube which is unsuitable for most school students but it can also be a valuable source of educational material.
Last weekend, here in Dunbar, it was Lifeboat Day which I unfortunately missed. It’s a great event with crowds of people around the harbour and the volunteer lifeboat men giving demonstrations of rescuing people. What I did do, was go down to the harbour on the following day. I took the picture below at the harbour but went down the steps to water level. You can see the bunting still up from the Lifeboat Day and some of the boats in the water at fairly low tide.
Boats at low tide
