We often heard it said that teachers have to be actors today in order to keep the attention of today’s low attention span students. Well, in this episode I agree that teachers and actors do think alike in many ways - but not in the ways most people think. Join me as I explore how teachers and actors think alike in terms of objectives, obstacles, “raising the stakes”, and getting feedback from other actors/students.

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Resources for this episode

• Click here to go to the Angry Alien site where you can see the 30 second version of It’s A Wonderful Life and other very funny movie re-enactments performed by animated bunnies.
• The Respect for Acting page at Amazon. The author is Uta Hagen.
• The Audition page at Amzon. Author: Michael Shurtleff.
• The True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor page at Amazon. Author: David Mamet.
• The Sanford Meisner on Acting site on Amazon.

 

 Acting and Teaching [26:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I decided that it was time to look at the biology behind the changes that occur in our lives as we grow. As I put my ideas together to do this, I employed a very neat program called Timeliner. It is so cool in fact that I decided to do an episode solely on how to use Timeliner, especially the tool called “merge”. If you are an educator I think you’ll find this episode interesting. It shows how to use Timeliner to compare timelines that focus on different aspects of life - in this case I merge Erikson’s stages with significant events in my life and then with some of the significant the physical changes that occur in everyone’s life as we age. In part 2 I’ll talk more about these changes, but in this episode I just wanted to share how great a program Timeliner is. This is an uncompensated endorsement of this great program. I wanted to share how this program could be an example of what Jonnassen calls a “mindtool”. Hope you find this interesting.

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Resources for this podcast

• Go to the Tom Snyder Productions website where you can purchase Timeliner and explore development across the lifespan.
• I mention Jonassen in the podcast. Here is a link to his text on mindtools.

Related Episodes

Other information on Erikson can be found in these podcasts:

• Interviews with individuals in the different stages of Erikson’s model can be found in episode 21.

• Part 2 of this series on Erikson’s stages can be found in episode 24.

• Part 3 of this series on Erikson’s stages can be found in episode 25.

 

 The Brains Behind Erikson part 1 Timeliner [14:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download