"The mission of MY HERO is to use media and technology to celebrate the best of humanity and to empower young people to realize their own potential to effect positive change in the world."
Quite a mission! I liked this site as a resource for teaching and sharing digital stories and videos for students and educators. You can create films, art, or stories about heroes and post them all here.
There are excellent examples of films created by elementary and secondary students. This could be a good site to watch a couple of films and then ask students "What makes a good film?" Films are 10 minutes or less. There are also lesson plans for teachers and multimedia tutorials and registration is free! Students can find heroes in the news and start from there. This is a great jumping off point for discussion. The site is getting into podcasting a little more than in the past. Students can upload their movies and podcasts here.
The deadline for this years "Short Film Festival is Sept. 1st! That's a little too quick, unless you make assignments over the summer. The winners from last year's festival can be found here: Winners 2009
MY HERO has an online template page where you can organize your thoughts, write about your hero, gather information and pictures and create a MY HERO webpage. You cannot make corrections after submitting the webpage so kids - get your spelling right. They will review and publish student stories.
One of the excellent things they have done is create a mirror site in Spanish. This could be very motivating for Spanish speaking students and I noticed a lot of Hispanic content in the films and stories.
