Dr. Tyson began the Pythagorean Award at Mabry during the 2002 - 2003 school year to recognize the highest math achievement at our school. The trophy itself, pictured to the left, is an original work commissioned by the renouned Hans Gobo Fräbel studios. The giant "greater than" mathematical symbol reads, "Math Achievement: We're greater than!" and holds the name of each year's winner. Our math students in 8th grade are invited to come to school early to take a very difficult math test. The top three winning students then compete in front of their entire 8th grade class solving math problems based on time and accuracy. The winning student receives a Pythagorean Award Plaque and this highest math honor at Mabry. Additionally, we host this podcast, which you can view in your browser window, of the three bright young finalists in the 2007 competition: Emily, Eli, and Conrad. The winner of the 2007 Pythagorean Award is Conrad. Congratulations! Emily Eli Conrad 

Podcast Central

The Pythagorean Award at Mabry (VP)

Earlier in the year I was delighted when Mica's parents shared with me that she was selected to be a Page for State Senator Chip Rogers! In this podcast Mica and I talk about this experience, how she was selected, what her goals and aspirations are, and what this experience meant to her. You will not want to miss getting to know this wonderful Mabry student who has a very bright future ahead of her! You can watch this podcast in your browser window by clicking on this link, or you can download it to your computer (and for your video iPod) by clicking on the image below. 

Kid Capacity: Podcast with Mica (VP)

Three years ago Cobb County School District began an annual recognition program for the Professional of the Year in which each school staff elected a staff member in a non-certified position for special recognition. We wanted to do something special for these three employees, elected over the last three years, to honor their service to our school. Therefore, we created this podcast to highlight their contributions to Mabry Middle School. You may watch the podcast in your browser by simply clicking on this link. 

Celebrating Our Professionals of the Year (VP)

In this podcast Dr. Tyson celebrates some of the many achievements of the students, parents, and staff at Mabry Middle School over the past 6 years. He announces the new principal that will begin working at Mabry on July 1st. You may watch the podcast in your browser by simply clicking on this link. 

Dr. Tyson Announces New Beginnings (VP)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the 6th Annual Mabry Film Festival. We begin our evening extravaganza with students from the Mabry Orchestra performing Celtic Fiddle Tune. Please welcome our Celtic Fiddlers! Orchestra performs: “Celtic Fiddle Tune” In May of 2001 Mabry Middle School held our first Film Festival. We did something really new: All of our movies were produced on the computer. At that time we did not realize that this simple idea, to have students and teachers use more technology in class, would lead Mabry Middle School to set the standard for technology innovation in public schools. As a result of this plan, last year Mabry was awarded Scholastic and Intel Corporation’s prestigious School of Distinction Award for Technology Innovation, an award that brought over a quarter million dollars worth of technology to our school. Amazingly, by leveraging connectivity through the iTunes store and MabryOnline.org’s Podcast Central, our students’ and teachers’ work has been seen all over the world. Our website has served up over 300 gigabytes of data to users the world over. And this figure does not include a single digital media file! We have actually received emails from every continent on earth. And hundreds of visitors from all over the United States as well as the United Kingdom, the Republic of Georgia (the former Soviet Union), and Australia have come to Mabry to see how we accomplish the amazing work we do with digital media. Tonight we have the privilege and the pleasure to present to you the 6th Annual Mabry Middle School Film Festival. Tonight we celebrate our theme: “Making Our World a Better Place.” Best Teaching & Learning Our first category for the evening is Best Teaching and Learning. The objective for these movies was to create a movie that would be the best representation of curricular significance. The nominees are: • Clase de Español • Immigration Past and Present • Who Is An American • Who Lives and Who Dies 

2007 Best Teaching & Learning (VP)

I am not sure that people realize what a distinguished panel of judges we have used over the years, people who work in the communications and media industry in television, cable, and film, as well as people in technology, education, and even the state department of education. During the judging this year, one of the judges asked “How do your students and teachers do it? They just get better and better when I think they can’t get any better!” The movies in our next category, the Documentary, were to strive to be the best presentation of political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner. The nominees for Best Documentary are: • Adoption • Frankengenes • Is It You? • Living Hope • Nothing But Nets • Through Technology 6th Graders Can Change the World 

2007 Best Documentary (VP)

This next category is absolutely the most difficult one for our students to master. The sound in a movie shapes the whole emotional tone of the movie’s content. The sound can make a great idea even more powerful. But while it is so powerful, it is very hard to get clean sound without a lot of noise. The nominees in this category did an excellent job of using sound, sound levels, and sound elements (music choice, sound effects, voiceover, dialogue and mixing) to powerfully convey the message of the movie. The nominees for Best Sound are: • Decisions • Frankengenes • Girls Got Game • Immigration Past and Present • Music Our Bond • Nothing But Nets • Who Lives and Who Dies 

2007 Best Sound (VP)

The movie-makers in the Best Editing category did an excellent job of putting together all of the elements of the movie to create the finished product. They accomplished the difficult task of making it all come together in a way that goes beyond just making sense to telling a compelling story. Many times this includes adding still pictures, special sound editing, special effects, titles and transitions in addition to importing their footage. Editing on the computer requires skill and patience. And the nominees are: • Do You Have Religious Freedom • Frankengenes • Girls Got Game • Music Our Bond • Nothing But Nets • Who Lives and Who Dies 

2007 Best Editing (VP)

The screenplay is the story. Each movie has no more than 2 minutes to make a compelling point. If you don’t think writing a short screenplay is difficult, you just haven’t tried it before. The screenplay has to sell the concept, the one main point of the movie, to the audience. It requires extensive research, writing, editing, rewriting, and group collaboration. The nominees for Best Screenplay are: • Adoption • Immigration Past and Present • Frankengenes • Nothing But Nets • Through Technology 6th Graders Can Change the World • Who Lives and Who Dies 

2007 Best Screenplay (VP)

 The movie-makers in the Best Cinematography category did an excellent job with the overall visual impact of their film: lighting, composition and camera angles, photography, and framing. They did an exceptional job of making sure that the visual information in their movie told their story well. This year, Dr. Tyson challenged us to shoot our own footage and not rely so much on still images found on the internet. Perhaps as a result, more than any previous year, more of our movies include some really great footage that was actually shot by our students. Some movies even incorporated footage from the operating room at Emory University and footage shot in South America specifically for their movie. Our students used interesting visuals, camera angles, and made their footage look very professional. And the nominees are: • Communication with Technology • Decisions • Do You Have Religious Freedom • Frankengenes • Music Our Common Bond • Through Technology 6th Graders Can Change the World 

2007 Best Cinematography (VP)

Special Recognition We would like to take just a moment tonight to celebrate the theme for our film festival this year: Making Our World a Better Place. This year we wanted to take what we learn in our classes and use that to make our world better. Making the movies to show you tonight is a tremendous amount of very hard work. Making these movies make a difference is even more challenging. Taking what we have learned in school to the big screen in the hope that it will cause everyone in our audience to help us all make our world a better place is what this festival is all about! It takes very special people with very special gifts to be able to go from an idea to a real finished product. For the past five years, we have been privileged to enjoy a very special collaboration with a real genius, an actual director and producer in the commercial film industry who has done just that: guided us in taking our ideas to the bring screen, turning them into the finished products that you see tonight. His genius is his amazing ability to help each team of students shape their ideas, to focus on making one compelling point as powerfully as we can possibly make it. He gives each team of students his professional advice, which we can choose to take or not. Each movie team gets to spend about 20 minutes with him 6 times throughout the course of our 5 month project. So not only is he a genius, but he is also amazingly generous with his time. Dr. Tyson says that Mr. Ciralante is not a person; he’s an energy field. He takes time out from his busy production schedule to freely give his professional guidance to the students of Mabry to help us make our world a better place. We will present a small token of our appreciation, a $50 gift certificate to the iTunes store for him or his son. While Mr. Ciralante could not be with us tonight, we wanted to publically say, “Thank you, Mr. Ciralante.” iPod Awards The iPod is such a powerful media player device. I love mine! I love listening to all of my music on it. But when Apple announced the video iPod, it got even more outrageously cool! Dr. Tyson will place all of the movies in each category of the Film Festival on our website in Podcast Central. That means, that in the next few days, anyone in the world will be able to download the movies you have seen tonight from the iTunes Store or from MabryOnline’s Podcast Central! To think that every movie seen tonight will be in global distribution–that’s just amazing! Anyone, anywhere in the world can watch our movies on their computer and can even download them onto their video iPods. NAM: So tomorrow morning someone riding on the Tube in London might be watching our movies! That’s just way cool! And because of the generosity of Apple Incorporated, who is donating 3, 80 gigabyte video iPods to Mabry Middle School, three Mabry students are about to win a state of the art video iPod. So they will be able to download all of our movies, including their own, onto their new video iPod! The judges selected three movies they thought should receive the iPods. The students on each team then selected which student would win the iPod if their movie was selected by the judges. Best Picture Category The most coveted category award is winning the Best Picture Category. The criteria for this category is to combine all of the elements of the movie to bring a powerful emotional impact that convincingly conveys a significant message, leaving a lasting impression. But before we announce the winner for the Best Picture category, we will not only watch each of the movies that have been nominated for this coveted category, we will hear some very brief comments from each team about the movie they made. You will hear that each team of students gives great thought and care to the product they produce. They sincerely want to make our world a better place. Final Award And we have one final award made possible by the generous sponsorship of a very prestigious organization. The International Society for Technology in Education, commonly referred to as ISTE, hosts an annual international technology conference attended by over 20,000 educators from around the world. That conference, the National Educational Computing Conference, is actually being held here in Atlanta this summer, and the closing keynote presentation will be Dr. Tyson and selected Mabry students talking about this very film festival you are attending tonight. That’s an incredible honor that recognizes our students’ exemplary work. Leslie Connery, Deputy CEO and Conference Chair for ISTE has called our film festival “a national treasure” and wants educators the world over to know about it. ISTE has therefore chosen to be one of our Mabry Movie Academy sponsors and has donated an Apple MacBook and a Mini Digital Video Camera to be awarded to a single student tonight. For this unbelievable award, the judges could select any movie from all of the movies submitted in the film festival to receive this amazing gift. Each team had to select the one student on their team that would win the computer and digital video camera should their movie be selected by the judges. Conclusion The Mabry Film Festival is an incredible event that has earned our school prestigious international recognition. We hope that our movies tonight have challenged you to make our world a better place. It sounds like such a difficult thing to do. But it’s really fairly easy. Simply be nice to the people around you. Help others. Go that extra step to attain your personal best. Several of our movie teams wish to solicit donations from you tonight, including your bodies organs! We encourage you to stop by their tables, or take their fliers, as you leave and consider how you can help them attain their goal to make our world a better place. It has been our pleasure to be your hosts this evening. Thank you for coming, and goodnight. 

2007 Best Picture Category (VP)

I recently became aware of a new energy drink called Cocaine when several of our students told us that they drank 5 of them in one sitting! They became very ill. I then began to investigate these drinks and was rather shocked by what I learned. I encourage our parents and students to listen carefully to this brief interview with Mr. Dess. Not only is what he says eye opening, I suspect it is also widely unknown. 

Dr. Tyson Talks with Jeff Dess

Our 7th grade students spent last week on a science expedition on Jekyll Island, exploring the marine habit and ecosystems. Not only did they have a tremendous amount of fun, but they attended classes in the field, studying: The Slouth The Maritime Forest The Beach The Marsh The Dock Herpetology Endangered Species The depth of understanding acquired by our students by seeing, feeling, and holding first hand is difficult to match. Be sure to visit the Jekyll Island, 2007 blog at the Mabry Global Learning Collaborative. You will find hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the students in their classes. While on the island, student created short video podcasts of their experiences. This podcast highlights the marsh. You can download it to your computer (for your video iPod) by clicking on the picture below, or you can watch it in your browser window by clicking on this link. 

Jekyll Island Podcast: The Marsh (VP)

Our 7th grade students spent last week on a science expedition on Jekyll Island, exploring the marine habit and ecosystems. Not only did they have a tremendous amount of fun, but they attended classes in the field, studying: The Slouth The Maritime Forest The Beach The Marsh The Dock Herpetology Endangered Species The depth of understanding acquired by our students by seeing, feeling, and holding first hand is difficult to match. Be sure to visit the Jekyll Island, 2007 blog at the Mabry Global Learning Collaborative. You will find hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the students in their classes. While on the island, student created short video podcasts of their experiences. This podcast highlights the beach. You can download it to your computer (for your video iPod) by clicking on the picture below, or you can watch it in your browser window by clicking on this link. 

Jekyll Island Podcast: The Beach (VP)

 Our 7th grade students spent last week on a science expedition on Jekyll Island, exploring the marine habit and ecosystems. Not only did they have a tremendous amount of fun, but they attended classes in the field, studying: The Slouth The Maritime Forest The Beach The Marsh The Dock Herpetology Endangered Species The depth of understanding acquired by our students by seeing, feeling, and holding first hand is difficult to match. Be sure to visit the Jekyll Island, 2007 blog at the Mabry Global Learning Collaborative. You will find hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the students in their classes. While on the island, student created short video podcasts of their experiences. This podcast highlights the maritime forest, also known as Boneyard Beach. You can download it to your computer (for your video iPod) by clicking on the picture below, or you can watch it in your browser window by clicking on this link. 

Jekyll Island Podcast: Maritime Forest and Boneyard Beach (VP)

This collection of podcasts is produced by the students, teachers, and administration of Mabry Middle School to enhance communication among all of the stake holders in our school community. We hope you enjoy keeping up with our school.

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Podcast Central

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