Discovery Communications cans "Bad Teachers"

Designed to expose shocking facts about educators, "Bad Teachers" premiered last week on the Investigation Discovery network. Its run lasted one week after parent company Discovery Communications pulled the plug on the series today.

Steve Dembo, writing for Discovery Education posted the following statement on the organization's blog today.

"Discovery Education’s mission is to celebrate and support the millions of dedicated professionals around the world who have made teaching their life’s work.

As such, we share your concerns with the ID program “Bad Teacher.”

Discovery Communications operates over 200 channels worldwide and 14 in the US, including the entertainment channel ID. The program “Bad Teacher” on ID is not associated with, nor does it reflect the beliefs of, Discovery Education.

We appreciate the support of the educational community for bringing this to our attention and we are pleased to share that Discovery Communications has decided to immediately cancel this program, removing it from ID’s on-air and online schedule.

At Discovery Education, we hold teachers and the teaching profession in the highest regard. We remain committed to supporting educators around the world in their tireless efforts to enhance the culture of learning for every child, every day."

Thank you Discovery Communications and Discovery Education for all you do.

Okay CBS, it is time for you to do the same with your new sitcom with a similar name.

Action Movie FX plus green construction paper equals iMovie McGyver gold

While finishing an unconference session with Dennis Grice at the Discovery Education Summer Institute on ways to create cool effects and titles for iMovie by using Keynote slides with the funky asparagus color, I had an "oh wow" moment.

"What if?" I excitedly asked myself, "I pulled out the silly JJ Abrams created Action Movie FX app and instead of filming an object to flood or explode I just filmed green?"

[caption id="attachment_212" align="aligncenter" width="248"] free app available for the iPhone.[/caption]

Would it work in iMovie (iLife '11 not iOS version) as a green screen layer?

I frantically raced around looking for green construction paper and to my assistance came Kyle Schutt and Chad Lehman. They pulled a piece out of a supply case and I was off to try it.

I recorded the effect and saved to camera roll.

[caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="283"] Record a few seconds of green.[/caption]

Next I imported the effect clip over green I had saved to iMovie and created a new project. I dragged a clip up onto the project timeline of Dean Shareski who was one of the lead facilitators of the institute. Another group of guys and I had been working on a silly mashup video and we had a fun clip of Dean acting surprised.

The next step was to drag the effect clip of the flood directly on top of the Dean clip until an options menu appeared. You have to be using iLife 11 and you need advanced tools selected in your iMovie preferences.

Next I selected "Green Screen".

After getting the effect clip in the right place, I tested it and the water was coming in too high. I simply used the crop option and tweaked the effect oh so slightly. This tweaking was a Dennis Grice idea and really speaks to the increased flexibility that creating the effects on green provides over trying to do everything with the iPhone.

Below is the final product.

Sure...this is silly. Just think though of the creativity that students can generate. Think of the fun. Think of all of the language arts that can be fostered by creating "What if..." video writing prompts like "What if dinosaurs invaded the Obama inauguration?" or "What if Justin Bieber was trapped under a rock?" and kids had to write about how the problem was solved. Seems like pretty good pedagogy starting out with an anticipatory set like that.

What I plan to do for my students is record all of the different effects on green paper and then place them on Google Drive in a folder students can access. For appropriate use, students can then download effect clips and import them into iMovie projects. There is then no need for them to all have devices with the app on it. Since the app is free I also feel good that we aren't skirting any process that would be outside the ethical bounds of sharing. We can apply to an endless amount of footage which expands the app's capability exponentially.

See what other cool ideas you can think of. I would love to hear them in the comments.