Session 4: Media and Digital Design Connections in History and English Language Arts Classrooms Wednesday, June 30, 2010 1:00–2:15 pm Pacific Time
Dan Norton, Founding Partner, Lead Designer Filament Games
Dan Norton is a founding partner and Lead Designer at Filament Games. He specializes in crafting educational game design documents and storyboards that originate from learning objectives. He is proud to have designed games about a uniquely broad range of topics, ranging from marine turtle ecology to legal argumentation. Dan sees Filament as an opportunity to merge his life long love of games with his incessant quest to learn about new and interesting things.
Tracy Heather Strain, Documentary Filmmaker and Producer of Educational Videos and Museum Segments
Tracy Heather Strain’s credits include: co-producer/director, "When the Bough Breaks" for California Newsreel’s duPont-Colubmia award-winning UNNATURAL CAUSES: Is Inequality Making us Sick?, producer/director, "Building the Alaska Highway" for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE; co-producer, ADRIFT for Tom Curran’s Night Train Pictures; producer/director/ writer, "The Story We Tell" for California Newsreel’s RACE: The Power of an Illusion; and producer/director/ writer "Bright Like a Sun" and "The Dream Keepers" for Blackside’s I’LL MAKE ME A WORLD: A Century of African-American Arts, which won a George Foster Peabody Award among other honors.
Strain’s other credits include the multi-award-winning PBS series THE GREAT DEPRESSION (Associate Producer/Researcher) and AMERICA'S WAR ON POVERTY (Series Researcher) as well as DISCOVER: The World of Science (Associate Producer). Her forays into dramatic filmmaking include work at the distribution company Cinecom and a position as art department coordinator on Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA.
A principal in The Film Posse, Inc. with her husband Randall MacLowry, Strain is presently developing and producing a number of projects including A BAKER'S DOZEN: 13 Essential Donut Stories, and with Chiz Schultz Inc., the multiplatform Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project about the life, art, and times of the playwright best known for A RAISIN IN THE SUN. She is a graduate of Wellesley College (American Studies) and holds an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Technology, Innovation and Education).