We have been VERY busy planning the Shanghai Student Film Festival over the past several months. This has turned out to be such an amazing experience for so many of our middle school studentsin my school. This year, more than ever, students are creating content and displaying their knowledge using multimedia software on our Macs. The actual S2F2 event is tomorrow (more on that later) where we’ll have about 400 students from around Shanghai gather in one place to celebrate our films.  What is special about S2F2 this year though is that ALL students in our schools have been able to be a part of S2F2 activities.

This week, we have been fortunate to have Mr. Scott McCloud visit our campuses as part of the S2F2 lead up. Mr. McCloud works a great deal with digital comics and he is an incredible storyteller. Students listened to him give a student oriented TED Talk for a full hour and he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. He is a master storyteller! The way he demonstrates the use of an infinite canvas to share stories speaks to me.  He even wrote a recent blog post about Prezi – of course, I love that after my first prezi last month!

After the TED Talk, Mr. McCloud worked with all of our 6th graders in their art classes. The 6th grade students are staring a comic unit and they were able to learn from the best during class! Thank you so much to Mr. McCloud for visiting our campus. He’s a professional and better yet, he’s a genuinely nice man!!