Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

I haven’t written much here recently.  That’s because I’ve been spending most of my waking life working on a special family project.  I’ve been digitizing my dad’s old 8mm movies.  So far, I’ve dealt with the first 20 years–from 1952 to 1972.

I started by setting up my digital video camera on a tripod and re-filming the old videos as projected on a screen.  I’ve used Windows Movie Maker to edit the footage and then to create DVD’s that can be viewed on TV.  The project has been a veritable labour of love.

The clip I’ve embedded above is a special tribute that I’ve put together for  Dad’s 80th birthday celebration tomorrow.  The video starts with a set of stills I took from Dad’s original movies.  Then it proceeds  with movie clips and moves chronologically from 1952.   Dad purchased his Kodak Brownie movie camera when my twin brothers were born in October of that year. (I was already 15 months old.)

The first 5 years represented were all shot in Southern Ontario.  We lived in Lions Head and then St Catherines.  Most of the next 10 years of footage were filmed in India–in West Bengal and in the Mussoorie area of the Himalayan foothills.   There was a year in the middle of our  Indian sojourn when we lived in Don Mills, Ontario.  The final clips of the video were shot when our family lived in Stouffville, Ontario.  The very last clip shows a drive past the house where Dad was born in 1928.

I’m writing this from the Calgary Airport.  I’m en route from Vancouver Island to Ontario so my wife and I can spend the next couple of weeks with my parents.  I’m happy to report that they are both going very strong, and working almost as hard as ever.  I’ll be completely off line for most of the next two weeks because there is no internet connection at the cottage where my parents normally spend August, the only month of the year when they are not going full tilt.