AFI Screen Education

We just wanted to take a moment from our testing of our new soon to be released video sharing site AFI ScreenNation (more on that later) to plug some upcoming conference workshops and sessions.

We’re proud to present for the first time the classic 1-day ScreenEd workshop at the California Computer Using Educators Conference in Palm Springs on

Thursday March 6th 8:30-4:30.

Additionally, we have a 1-hour informational concurrent session on Friday, March 7th from 3-4pm at the Convention Center.

Seats are still available for the workshop.

Click here for registration info.

Heading to San Antonio for NECC this summer? Don’t leave town without checking out our concurrent session on

Wednesday, July 2nd 1:30 -2:30 .

We’ll have lots of new resources and goodies to preview and showcase including an update on the launch of ScreenNation and a new series of tutorial videos.

Click here for more info.

At a White House ceremony this week, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to author Harper Lee. Bush praised Lee’s 1961 book, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD as a “gift to the entire world” and one that “has influenced the character of our country for the better.

Mockingbird, a staple on the reading lists of thousands of schools nationwide, won Lee a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The 1962 film adaptation directed by Robert Mulligan and staring Gregory Peck won 3 Academy Awards in 1962 including Best Actor for Mr. Peck and Best Adapted Screenplay for Horton Foote.

To Kill a Mockingbird has also made frequent appearances on many of the AFI 100 years 100 Movies lists. It is # 25 on the all-time top 100 American movies, #2 on the 100 most inspiring films, the music composed by Franz Waxman was ranked #17 as best film score and Peck’s Atticus Finch is listed as the #1 hero on the AFI 100 Heroes & Villains list.

Educators all over the world use the movie to teach the book and the book to teach the movie. Comparing this book to the film it inspired has also made its way into the teaching of AFI Screen Ed Process as a means of understanding how the written word can correlate to and contribute to the understanding of visual grammar.

Shots=Sentences, Scenes=Paragraphs and so on. The medium may differ but the telling of great stories remains central to the human experience.

The AFI Screen Education Center congratulates Ms. Lee on this honor.

Since launching the Lights, Camera, Education! resource last year on Discovery’s unitedstreaming.com, we’ve been thrilled at how educators have made use of the materials. Teachers all over the country are using the process and videos to enhance how they teach with videos but are also leading local professional development workshops, teaching their colleagues ‘The Door Scene’ as a means of fostering greater visual literacy and greater cooperation.

Just last weekend as AFI’s Frank Guttler was leading a 1 day workshop for both students and teachers at the International Student Media Festival in Anaheim California; Joe Brennan Discovery Star and Apple ADE was at the Sedona Center for Art and Technology in Arizona teaching ‘Lights, Camera, Education!’.

Elaine Plybon, a Texas alumni of the workshop held at the AFI Dallas Film Festival in March has been using the Screen Ed materials in her Irvine Texas USD development workshops and recently presented the first virtual AFI Lights, Camera, Education! workshop in Second Life! (More on that soon)

Joe Brennan has been an early adopter of the Screen Ed Process and the Lights, Camera, Education! series, his blog posts are a great guide to the using, learning and teaching with the AFI materials. His wisdom can be accessed at his LCE! blog.

Watch this space for more news, stories and tips for using the AFI Screen Ed process and Lights, Camera, Education! in your classrooms and professional development workshops.