TV Studio: This Week in Rap

Flocabulary Launches ‘The Week in Rap’ - A Week's Worth of News, Rapped
– Teen-Friendly News Delivery Helps Spark Classroom Discussion About Current Events –

OMW...it's about time! ...i suspect inspired by E! News - The Daily 10's Hollywood Rap-Up where each week, rapper Infinite-1 condenses all of the top stories into an extremely funky rap now we have that same idea but but classroom friendly, newsworthy (sorry Paris, Miley, & Lindsay!) and fit for TV studios and/or social studies classrooms!

(dance montage mixed in makes it funky fresh)
"A new Web site from the creators of Flocabulary.com, a music project initially intended to expand students’ vocabulary by teaching them rap songs, is now also making current events more accessible by rapping about them." The new site is called The Week in Rap.

"Every Friday, Flocabulary’s hip-hop artists produce a two-minute music video summarizing the major news stories of the week. The classroom-safe videos are posted on www.theweekinrap.com. The idea is that students who spend the majority of their time listening to music and watching videos online can now catch up on current events by checking out each week’s post.

Each Week in Rap post contains lyrics to the songs and key words that are highlighted with links to news stories from leading news outlets where viewers can get more information about that news topic. Recent posts discuss such current events as the economic downturn, politics, the Iraq War, sports, Nobel Prize winners, technology and the Economy"

"You have a giant thumb, I see you like to text,

But I text a lot too, so I might be next,

I might confess I once drove and texted,

But some teens want to make that so I’d get arrested,

“License, registration, step out of the car,

Are you carrying a cell phone? I know a lot of you are,”

Lyrics 3.20
"The listener’s experience is enhanced visually with a montage, and links embedded in the song lyrics lead to articles and videos that explain the stories in more detail. Cofounder Blake Harrison told CBS that kids want to learn but many students lack access to news that engages them: “It’s hard to care about something that you don’t know about.”

"Flocabulary co-founder and The Week in Rap creator Blake Harrison believes that learning about the news in this format will encourage students to dig deeper. “We use humor to get kids involved, but the goal is to give them an opportunity to learn more,” says Harrison. To that end, the lyrics to the songs contain links to news stories from prominent newspapers and TV shows.

Flocabulary’s goal for the project is to have teachers play the short videos in their classrooms on Monday mornings. The creators think it’s a great way to focus student attention after a weekend, and also a great way to spark a discussion on current events."

TECH TIP: My county blocks Vimeo so i can't see the vid on the main page...but if you go down to the lyrics below the vid and click download the video comes up as a Quicktime .MOV that we can see and broadcast on our daily news show....

i've also talked to the guys at flocabulary.com and requested that they also mirror it on teacher tube...that way we could embed the vids on our blogs or wiki's to use with social studies classes and current events discussions.

but the flocab guys haven't kept up with the mirroring as i would have hoped because thee embed script on the main site is to Vimeo...which again, is blocked for my county.

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Sources: findingDulcinea, & PRAvenue.com

MHMS Interweb Access@Home Survey 09

Please take a moment to answer our survey...thanks!
~Miss Jones

The News is Cool Now: This Week in Rap

Flocabulary Launches ‘The Week in Rap’ A Week's Worth of News, Rapped
– Teen-Friendly News Delivery Helps Spark Classroom Discussion About Current Events –

like, OMW...it's about time! ...i suspect inspired by E! News - The Daily 10's Hollywood Rap-Up where each week, rapper Infinite-1 condenses all of the top stories into an extremely funky rap now we have that same idea but but classroom friendly, newsworthy (sorry Paris, Miley, & Lindsay!) and fit for TV studios and/or social studies classrooms!

(dance montage mixed in makes it funky fresh)

"A new Web site from the creators of Flocabulary.com, a music project initially intended to expand students’ vocabulary by teaching them rap songs, is now also making current events more accessible by rapping about them." The new site is called The Week in Rap.

"Every Friday, Flocabulary’s hip-hop artists produce a two-minute music video summarizing the major news stories of the week. The classroom-safe videos are posted on www.theweekinrap.com. The idea is that students who spend the majority of their time listening to music and watching videos online can now catch up on current events by checking out each week’s post.

Each Week in Rap post contains lyrics to the songs and key words that are highlighted with links to news stories from leading news outlets where viewers can get more information about that news topic. Recent posts discuss such current events as the economic downturn, politics, the Iraq War, sports, Nobel Prize winners, technology and the Economy"

"You have a giant thumb, I see you like to text,

But I text a lot too, so I might be next,

I might confess I once drove and texted,

But some teens want to make that so I’d get arrested,

“License, registration, step out of the car,

Are you carrying a cell phone? I know a lot of you are,”

Lyrics 3.20
"The listener’s experience is enhanced visually with a montage, and links embedded in the song lyrics lead to articles and videos that explain the stories in more detail. Cofounder Blake Harrison told CBS that kids want to learn but many students lack access to news that engages them: “It’s hard to care about something that you don’t know about.”

"Flocabulary co-founder and The Week in Rap creator Blake Harrison believes that learning about the news in this format will encourage students to dig deeper. “We use humor to get kids involved, but the goal is to give them an opportunity to learn more,” says Harrison. To that end, the lyrics to the songs contain links to news stories from prominent newspapers and TV shows.

Flocabulary’s goal for the project is to have teachers play the short videos in their classrooms on Monday mornings. The creators think it’s a great way to focus student attention after a weekend, and also a great way to spark a discussion on current events."

TECH TIP: my county blocks Vimeo so i can't see the vid on the main page...but if you go down to the lyrics below the vid and click download the video comes up as a Quicktime .MOV that we can see and broadcast on our daily news show....

i've also talked to the guys at flocabulary.com (they're very nice!) and requested that they also mirror it on teacher tube...that way we could embed the vids on our blogs or wiki's to use with social studies classes and current events discussions. (see below)

but the flocab guys haven't kept up with the mirroring as i would have hoped because thee embed script on the main site is to Vimeo...which again, is blocked for my county.
but maybe if more teachers & media specialists ASK for it they will!~ [wink wink nudge nudge]
~Miss Jones

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Additional Sources:
findingDulcinea & PRAvenue.com

New Media Display OR....Ms. Jones is a Goofball

so, like you already knew that, right? but i'm telling you i haven't been THIS happy about a piece of media furniture in a long time!

look at it~ it's a pyramid!.....a pyramid of NEW BOOKS! OoooohAhhhhh! Booky goodness!

a rolling display where we can show you the new books or books around a certain theme.... its' gorgeous!


we also got a new display to house our ever growing collection of audio books on CD's and Playaways for our Audio Books to Go! program which i've blogged about before....

Our new Audio Book display unit!
SWEET!!!!

READ this Book! Digital Dares and Graveyards!

my friend, Adam Yeargin - Library Media Specialist from Bonnie Branch Middle School sent me this email!....

Little Brother

“A wonderful, important book…I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart thirteen-year-olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be thirteen again right now, and reading it for the first time.”

—Neil Gaiman, author of Sandman and American Gods on Little Brother"

i won't say when he sent this to me [coughAugustcough] so, i'm ordering it along with the Newberry Award Winning Book: Speaking of Neil Gaiman.....

"It takes a graveyard to raise a child. My favorite thing about this book was watching Bod grow up in his fine crumbly graveyard with his dead and living friends. The Graveyard Book is another surprising and terrific book from Neil Gaiman."
-- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

FINALLY a Newberry book i can actually get behind....i am SO gosh darn tempted to RANT about how i view the Newberry Awards and the Oscar Awards...sappy dramatic books/movies where someone has to get cancer or die....never something uplifting, exciting, or spooky!
But YAY! The Graveyard book is ALL that and a bag of bones....so adding to my Amazon.com cart is that book plus that Little Brother book...and not to be outdone by Adam back at ya, man!

READ THESE BOOKS!~ (trying to be artsy in my digi pics...don't snarf!)

The Steampunk (and geek) in me Loves
Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

"Bottom Line:This admirable and unique source demonstrates on nearly every page the surprising extent to which the language of science fiction has entered everyday English-terms and concepts such as beam me up, cyberspace, downtime, gateway, morph, newspeak, robot, and space cadet. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries with an interest in science fiction."--Library Journal

and

Aliens Are Coming!: The True Account Of The 1938 War Of The Worlds Radio Broadcast

"In this picture-book account of the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles's adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel, the author employs several creative methods to transport readers back to the heyday of radio. She leads into the story with a punchy introduction to the period, which is delivered in the form of a speech bubble by a smiling radio announcer. From there, black-and-white illustrations depict a family listening to an ordinary broadcast, which is interrupted by reports of an alien invasion. For the rest of the book, events described on the radio appear in lurid color illustrations reminiscent of old science-fiction magazines, while events in the real world remain in black and white. Excerpts from the actual radio play describe a vicious extraterrestrial attack, while the text describes the pandemonium ensuing outside the radio station and across the country. In the end, McCarthy reveals that the invasion was just a story, and an author's note gives a more detailed account of the play's creation and broadcast. In the spirit of the original, the author does not reveal the fact that the broadcast was actually a play until the end. This conceit would make the book a great read-aloud to introduce a unit on the 1930s. The interplay between the text of the play and the author's description of actual events is effective, and the illustrations are exaggerated and funny. A unique treatment of a fascinating topic, and sure to have wide appeal."

-Rachael Vilmar, Atlanta Fulton Public Library, GA

Take That, Mr. Yeargin!!! What?! You got anything ELSE to share~??? Bring it~!


LOL Murray Hill Rules!

Diary of Anne Frank: Holocaust Research

GT English Classes are reading the Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl and are doing Big 6 research to find the causes of the Holocaust and what it was like to live through it as a teenager.

Of course it's alarming when people don't know *anything* about the Holocaust or even worse, deny its existence.



The Pope yesterday released that he "Strongly Condemns Holocaust Deniers"



Isn't it amazing after 64 years and countess eyewitness accounts, books, and testimonies there are still people who deny that the genocide even existed?! This is something that i think our kids need to face...to get a proper perspective on the historical facts of the events that led up to the amazing piece of prose that is the Diary of a Young. What do young people already know about the Holocaust..??
Here is an MTV short about what Teens know about the Holocaust



Here's an interesting video about Anne Frank as a Writer

Out of the Dust: The Great Depression Research

Miss Cullison's and Mrs. Jett's 6th grade English classes came in to do Big 6 research on the great depression...enjoy our wiki page we made to go with it and these cool videos we found on TeacherTube.









A slideshow on The Dust Bowl from Long Beach Middle School, United States


The Great Depression Rap: Highlands High School Mr. Polcha's class