Lip Dubs the Rage on YouTube

Gosh, to be in high school or college again.

Technology has changed the way kids learn, they way they have fun, the way they communicate and the way they sing and dance. Just take a look at what’s become all the rage lately –”lip dubbing,” a relatively new phenomenon that takes an age-old idea, adds a Flipcam, some creative planning and YouTube, to create and distribute some of the most clever videos out on the web lately.

Take Shorewood High School and Shorecrest High School, both located near Seattle, Wash., rival schools currently competing on YouTube to make the best lipdub video, with the help of a couple of clever video teachers and about 300 of their closest friends. Videotaped in one take with a handheld videocam, they show hundreds of students individually mouthing the words to Hall & Oates’ “Make My Dreams Come True” (Shorewood) and the Black Eye Peas’ “Heya” (Shorecrest), as the camera moves down hallways, into offices, around corners, outdoors and into lobbies and gymnasiums, every student performer knowing his or her cue (generally).

Shorewood has gone one step further. There, the school videotaped in reverse, with the main lip-syncers learning the lyrics to the song in reverse before shooting began. It’s a hilarious, fun-loving video that features a variety of tricks that look cool in reverse — balloons in the air, paper airplanes, that kind of thing.

Perhaps influenced by the popularity of “Glee,” Fox’s hit show about a bunch of high school theater and musical “nerds” that belong to a glee club, the lip dub videos are reproducing like white mice. Other high schools with lip dub videos include Florida’s Bloomingdale High (performing to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”), Hempfield High School in Pennsylvania (“Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus), and Sandwich, Mass., High School’s version of Bowling for Soup’s “High School Never Ends.” Colleges and universities are beginning to join in the fray, with Boston University, Suffolk University and the University of Quebec at Montreal creating more lip dubs.

On Suffolk’s video channel, the school explains that the video was created by students and the Office of University Communications, and provides “a tour through some of Suffolk’s buildings and streets of Boston.”

The Suffolk video was shot with a cast of 50 students, took six weeks to produce and was filmed in one continuous shot. The video was rehearsed for two hours, with individual “scene managers” responsible for the action in each separate location in and around the Suffolk city campus. The lipdub was filmed live and took three “takes”. Not only that, but the video ends with the Suffolk University seal.

Seems to me that these lip dubs could be awesome promotion, public relations and recruiting tools, particularly at the college and university level.

Here’s the Suffolk video:

Learn How to Elect a President

Common Craft has done it again, producing a simple and amusing how-to video, this time on how we elect U.S. presidents. Common Craft, an ingenious company started by Sachi and Lee Lefever of Seattle, Wash., produces videos (public and available on YouTube and other video sites, and enhanced versions for corporate use) about somewhat complex topics in a simple-to-understand way. Using narration, paper cut-outs and animation, Common Craft videos include “RSS in Plain English,” “Twitter in Plain English,” “Wikis in Plain English,” and more. They’re fun to watch and easy to digest, and I often use them in my Web 2.0 workshops.
Their latest entry is “Electing a U.S. President in Plain English,” a must for anyone still confused by our popular vote vs. electoral system of electing a President. I can tell you it helped me, and this might be the perfect teachable moment for anyone — adults, kids, first-time voters.

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Tech TV

I was just rooting around YouTube the other day, searching for decent high school news shows I’d intended to promote here as a way to highlight how technology has come so far in the 21st century. Much to my chagrin, a lot of what I viewed on YouTube was either two years old (or older), and looked it, or was fairly pedestrian and not clearly connected to the school itself.

Coincidentally, eSchoolNews sent out an email this morning announcing that it has launched a new video news network, Student Video Network, which will provide students interested in video production with information on the most popular and relevant educational technology stories in the news.  Participating schools can then shoot a script based on the stories and choose to integrate graphics and photos into the news report.

“This is a real-world application of the technology skills they’re learning in school,” said Tom Lapping, president and CEO of JDL Horizons–the company hosting eSN‘s Student Video Network. “It will be good for school exposure, but also for students who could use this material as part of their college admissions or eventual job application.”

So far, I only see two high schools with videos on the site, but the quality is top-notch and the subject matter (gaming to school assessment information) timely. The videos don’t seem to be embeddable at the moment, but they will hopefully move in that direction.

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When Math is Greek…

When my son was an eighth-grader in a NY suburban school district, we almost impoded as a family. He just didn’t get the infamous Math A or Math B, was in serious danger of failing math (or worse, of giving up entirely), and our home was littered with math guides and the remains of various tutors.

He took after his parents, who weren’t the best math students either. My only memory of math class in middle school and high school, in fact, is that of being bored nearly to tears by an endless freak show of male teachers who hated their jobs.

Both my son and I could have used someone like D.J. Duey to teach us math. Now a media celebrity, Duey was a long-term substitute teacher in Michigan when he realized that his math students just weren’t getting it. A long-time lover of rap, Duey began to write his own raps about math, consulting with other teachers to determine the best way to combine rap, music, video and math and science learning into something a bit easier to digest than a textbook full of numbers.

Since releasing his first rap, Duey has released an album, “Class Dis-Missed,” which includes 17 songs that translate, in a fun way, some of the most difficult subjects to teach and understand. The reaction to Duey, from the teaching community, students and the media, has been overwhelmingly positive and he’s branched out into making his own music videos, many of which are now available for viewing on YouTube. Check out his fractions video here, one of my personal favorites, which has been viewed more than 3,900 times.

You can order his album on his own website.

Educate for a Creative Society: The Voice of Tom Peters

I love this little snippet of video from Tom Peters, corporate trainer and author of “In Search of Excellence.” I thought you might, too.

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An Inspiring Message for Teachers

I just have to share this video with you, which I discovered in a roundabout way — reading Valhalla computer teacher Jennifer Cronk’s blog and finding a link to the video. It will help you to remember why you went into education and that test scores should not be our only focus.

Catch the Train Before it Leaves the Station

If you’re a school official reluctant to enter the Internet’s Web 2.0 revolution, perhaps this video by Professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University will persuade you to climb onto this train before it’s too late.