In Memory of Sol, Eva, and Hy

In March of 2007 I started reacquainting myself with QuickTime VR movies. I remembered how relatively easy they were to make and how their file size was relatively small.  Susan Abdulezer, distinguished Apple Educator, media developer for District 75 (NYCDOE) and QuickTime guru, taught the CSD1 tech staff  the basics of the program  about 6-7 years ago. At that time we used QuickTime VR 2.0. This time in OSX I experimented with VR Worx. Panoramic movies are used extensively in real estate  and tourist sites. I often felt it's potential has gone untapped for social studies education. By linking one panorama to another, using hot spots, you can explore a given scene's both indoor and outdoor environments. You can also connect two or more outdoor environments with a kind of leap frog effect to help explore larger geographic areas. I've found in my years as a NYC public school teacher that many kids' knowledge of the city only extends to the 10 square block area of their neighborhoods.  Perhaps the creation of libraries of city-wide quicktime vr movies can provide some help in broadening their horizons. Certainly the kids can be taught the basics of the program as well and they could be turned loose to create their own portfolios. All you need is a digital camera and a tripod.  Freeware and shareware VR programs are readily available. There is also a vast potential for literacy education as such movies can inspire students to write about the neighborhood scenes that they create and explore. Liz Sevcenko, from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, many years ago had introduced the term "Mapping Memories" to a group of CSD1 teachers with pencil and paper and Tom Beller from his excellent site "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" has employed such a technique digitally with a NYC base map.  I felt that these movies that I was creating needed a home of their own, rather than being thrown into the chaotic mix of my blog, pseudo-intellectualism. Synchronicitiously came along another great Google For Educators innovation called Google Pages, which allowed me to do this as well as link to such helpful tools and widgets such as Google Maps and YouTube. It also allowed me to place an mp3 player below the image above for a musical dedication to my parents Sol and Eva Bellel and to my Uncle Hyman Genee

David Bellel 3/24.07

davidbellel@mac.com