Happy Holidays to everyone!

On Thursday our school held our Holiday Concert. Below I’ve highlighted 2 of the performance videos.

We called it our Holiday Concert, but in hindsight it was just a Christmas Concert. It wasn’t intentional, it was unintentional bias, but all of the songs performed were either Christmas songs, or songs that we tend to associate with Christmas. Next year I hope we can make it more of a world holiday affair, but for now enjoy my two favourite performances. Considering that all of the classes started practicing for this concert just 2 weeks earlier, it isn’t a surprise that the ones that I like are from teachers with music degrees. The first video is of two classes, Ms Shae & Yee’s class and my wife’s class, and includes my daughter Cassie. The second video is of Mr. Underhay’s class. Enjoy!

Christmas Comes from the Heart is wonderful! It sounds like a choir that practiced for months.

And this class combined their talents to perform a not-so-silent ska version of Silent Night.

Two other honourable mentions go to 4 year old Max’s Cello Solo and a fun version of Dancin’ on the Rooftop.

Enjoy the performances, and for those of you that celebrate Christmas, a very happy day to you. For those of you that celebrate other festivals and ceremonies this time of year, I’d love for you to link to some performances to help inspire our holiday concert next year.

When I told my daughter that rather than taking photos of her musical theater Christmas show solo, I actually filmed it… she immediately asked me, “Can you put me on YouTube?”

I obliged.

After Cassie saw the video she momentarily didn’t want it up. Why? Because she was sick for 3 days before-hand with a fever and sore throat, and so she had some trouble with a few of the high notes… Notes that she could hit just a few days ago. I told her how much her grandparents in Toronto wanted to see this and she permitted me to put it up. I happen to also think it is still pretty good:-)

And here is my other daughter Katie and her friends in their feature song:

For her there was an expectation that if her older sister could be on YouTube, then she should be too.

I haven’t put any photos on Flickr yet, but I will soon.

How different this is from my private childhood! I think I have some 8mm film of me on a beach when I was Cassie’s age. And I know there are some photos of me at that age burried in my basement or hidden away in my parent’s closet.

Meanwhile, somewhere between 3 and 5 million photos are uploaded onto Flickr daily. And, “Every minute, some 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. “That’s the equivalent of Hollywood releasing more than 57,000 full-length movies every week,” (Chad Hurley). That’s a lot of ‘flotsam and jetsam‘.

So it comforts me that my daughter, weeks before her 9th birthday, is concerned about the quality of her performance being publicly placed online. I wish more students thought that way before putting things on Facebook! Two of my recent – posts have been about the need for us to help guide our students and our children as they engage in a digital world.

I’ve had to do just that recently. My youngest, Katie, decided to check out ‘katie-dot-com’. She was greeted with rotating photos of topless women and an invitation to become the next p?rn star. She thought it was a lot more amusing than mom and dad did!

The talk with Katie was simple enough: There are a lot of inappropriate sites, and you should only be on favorites unless mom or dad are helping you, (after all, she is only 6). But this was also good for Cassie to hear. We are more liberal with her use of the computer and so it was good that she listened in too. We talked about closing windows if you found something inappropriate and also telling us… that we won’t be mad.

The fact is that our kids already do a good job policing themselves with what’s appropriate on tv and so it isn’t a big logical jump to do the same on the computer.

Years from now my girls will be able to view their childhood memories at any time from virtually anywhere. They are part of a digital generation, and we need to help them grow up digitally respectful and responsible.