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"Filmmaking is increasingly being used in the classroom by teachers who understand the wants, hopes and aspirations of their pupils. Recent BBC documentary The Rise of the Superstar Vloggers was an extremely interesting insight into what many people wrongly perceive to be a frivolous activity and an easy route to fame and fortune. Contrary to popular belief, becoming a superstar vlogger involves hours and hours of researching and writing content. When we consider how popular video is with children, it becomes clear that filmmaking is the secret weapon for accelerating progress in schools. By using filmmaking as an incentive to write, pupils are working to produce the kind of media that they love, while the teacher is easily able to coerce them to improve their writing and reading using video as a constant hook. One such school who took the plunge into filmmaking is Northway Primary School in Liverpool, nominated for the Educate Awards Innovative & Creative Literacy Award. Over the course of 11 weeks, the pupils planned, drafted, edited, performed and filmed their very own adventure film based on El Dorado, the search for the lost city of gold in Colombia made famous by Christopher Columbus himself."

"I'll admit I'm a bit biased here since I'm a filmmaker by trade, but I truly believe the process of planning and making videos can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age. Not only is the idea of telling stories with video really engaging for many kids, filmmaking is ripe with opportunities to connect to almost every academic subject area. As the technology to shoot and edit films becomes more ubiquitous, where is a teacher with no experience in video production to begin? I've shared some resources below to help you and your students get started on making blockbusters of your own."

"Yesterday after school my fourth-quarter filmmaking group made up of fourth and fifth grade students, met for the first time to start filming "The Ghost of Bethke." Although we have been writing the script and planning the movie for the past few weeks, this was the first time we met to start filming, but this time there is a twist. This time we are filming our movie exclusively on a new iPad (the iPad 3). I was impressed with the new camera on this iPad and I wanted to see if a movie could really be shot and edited on it."

"After my recent presentation at FETC, I got the usual question, "How do you know so much about filmmaking?" My answer is simple, "Atomic Learning.""

"Stop Motion Studio is a filmmaking app that can be used across the content areas.  Similar to the Lego movies you may have seen made by filmmakers on YouTube or claymation characters moving across the screen.  In the classroom teachers are using this app to have students demonstrate their understanding of content in lots of subject areas."

""What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was a kid, I dreaded the question. I never had a good answer. Adults always seemed terribly disappointed that I wasn't dreaming of becoming something grand or heroic, like a filmmaker or an astronaut. In college, I finally realized that I didn't want to be one thing. I wanted to do many things. So I found a workaround: I became an organizational psychologist. My job is to fix other people's jobs. I get to experience them vicariously - I've gotten to explore how filmmakers blaze new trails and how astronauts build trust. And I've become convinced that asking youngsters what they want to be does them a disservice."

"Here is some behind the scenes footage of my students using iPads to film an anti-bullying movie that the wrote. You will see them refer to their blue sheets which are their storyboard sketches of the movie."

"Everyone is a filmmaker. Learn how to be one here!"

"If you are a filmmaker who has considered using your iDevice to film your next project, then you should consider using the following apps to help you on the road to Oscar glory."

"Walt Disney gave us the storyboard: a set of images or illustrations that help designers visualize, experiment with, and sequence critical shots in a narrative. Defining key scenes, taking the time to flesh them out, and considering the influence of order on meaning serves filmmakers, artists, novelists, software designers, and animators well. As someone who frequently facilitates assessment design, I'm loving how storyboards can power up the process."

"Filmmakers are using virtual reality to make the problems of the developing world seem more ... real. But how can you see their work? You could buy a headset, but you might end up in virtual debt. Prices range from $200 to $500 for devices from big players like Oculus Rift, Sony and Samsung. And forking over that much cash is a problem since there's not a lot of content yet. MindMaze Software Engineer Nicolas Bourdaud demonstrates a virtual reality system at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. All Tech Considered Developers Continue Push To Make Virtual Reality Mainstream An attendee at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles plays Sony's Project Morpheus London Heist video game with a virtual reality headset and Move controllers. All Tech Considered Gaming Industry Pushes Virtual Reality, But Content Lags "You're in a store ... and here's all the head-mounted displays and then it costs $200 or $300. Why would you ever buy it when you don't know why you're buying it? You wouldn't," Tony Christopher, CEO of Landmark Entertainment Group, told NPR last month. But there are inexpensive options that require only your smartphone and some cardboard. Google Cardboard, a project of the tech giant, offers instructions and templates to build your own cardboard virtual reality headset. Grab a pair of scissors, X-Acto knife and some glue. Then find some cardboard at home, print out the templates, trace and cut out the different pieces and assemble your goggles. The instructions can get confusing, so our multimedia editor Ben de la Cruz suggests following a how-to video like this one from the tech site, CNET."

"Whether you're a student looking to get into the film industry or a teacher looking for reference points to help your pupils, you'll need all the online resources you can find. To make things a little easier for you, the film section of Tuppence Magazine has put together a list of the 25 best learning resources for film studies available online. It covers everything from film theory and study points to filmmaking, behind the scenes advice and useful inspiration, providing a wide range of options for teachers and students alike."

"The question of what creativity is and how it works will perhaps remain humanity's most unanswerable - but that hasn't stopped us from trying. On the heels of Neil Gaiman's recent reflection on the subject comes one from filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards and daughter of the great Leonard Shlain of Art & Physics fame. In this short installment from AOL's The Future Starts Here series, Shlain offers ten steps to the creative process based on her own experience in film and art, expanding, perhaps inadvertently, on Graham Wallace's famous 1926 model of the four stages of the creative process and incorporating other notable theories of yore, like John Dewey's emphasis on hunches and T.S. Eliot's insistence on idea-incubation."