Welcome to Denver

So we are in Denver for Karen to pick up her ISTE Teacher of the Year Award. (ISTE...the first letter stands for INTERNATIONAL...She is an INTERNATIONAL Teacher of the Year.) I have always wanted to see the weird murals at the Denver Airport. I had read about a lot of "conspiracy" theories that are pretty far out
Even though it's hard to swallow, they are a bit weird for an airport:


A little odd huh? A nazi like figure wiping people out. What a perfect way to say hello.



How would you like your restaurant next to this at the airport?



Whee. A little more cheerful unless you see the entire mural. There are others I want to find on our way out of the airport.

Folk Art

One of my more eclectic pursuits is collecting Folk Art. I don't know exactly what got me started on it. For several years I collected original comic book art and I still have several pieces of that. But something about Folk Art spoke to me. It's usually done by "untrained" artists. Most of them are from the south and grew up in poverty. They used the materials the found around them for their creations. Here are a few of my pieces:

Glogster Home Page Starship McKillop

This is our Glogster webpage. We based it on our theme this year of the Starship McKillop. You can follow the links to over 30 pages of videos, book reviews, and Dr. Loopy shows. I hope to add some new ideas this year to make some of the pages into mini databases ceated by students.

Storytubes winners

Looking over some of my past posts I see that I never updated the fact that two of our kids won awards in the Storytubes book review contest. We had a second grader win the "Audience Favorite" and a third grader won the "Wild Card" portion of the contest. They were both thrilled with the awards. They got a trophy and a book store gift certificate for their wins. Another of our reviews was picked up by author Mo Willems and posted on his blog! Nine of our videos were up for voting in the finals. Not bad for a little 2a Texas school!

Audience Choice Winner

Storytubes Contest Entry: Katie Kazoo from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

Wild Card Winner

Amazon Commercial

Last summer Amazon has a "contest" for Amazon users to come up with a commercial for their company. Although they advertised it as a amateur competition, of course it wasn't. The winners (you've seen the stop motion Kindle commercials)were professional producers. Oh well...Amazon got some great talent for a bargain and it doesn't stop me from buying there. Here is the commercial I entered. It's a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Amazon .com entry. The Dawn of Shopping from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

How to Eat Like a Child

Our Cards OnSTAGE acting group recently finished our annual 3rd and 4th grade musical. These guys did an amazing job with the show! We selected How to Eat Like a Child because it had such a large flexible cast. We were very proud that these guys showed what they were capable of, especially the 4th graders that we had for two years. This was an after school activity that they had to commit to for 10 weeks. We had 60 kids involved in the production!

Starship McKillop Shortie Awards winner

My wife and I were both honored with Awards from the International Shortie Awards Film Festival in May. Karen won for Teacher Produced video and I won for 7-10 year old daily news broadcast. Karen also recently won the ISTE Educator of the Year. we will be heading to Denver this week to pick up that honor.