Give Us Each Day Our Daily Pan: QuickTime VR: Tanahey Park

A Quote From The Original Give Us Each Day...

It's url is here:
In March of 2006 I started reacquainting myself with QuickTime VR movies. I remembered how relatively easy they were to make and how their file size was relatively small. Susan Abdulezer, distinguished Apple Educator, media developer for District 75 (NYCDOE) and QuickTime guru, taught the CSD1 tech staff the basics of the program about 6-7 years ago. At that time we used QuickTime VR 2.0. This time in OSX I experimented with VR Worx. Panoramic movies are used extensively in real estate and tourist sites. I often felt it's potential has gone untapped for social studies education. By linking one panorama to another, using hot spots, you can explore a given scene's both indoor and outdoor environments. You can also connect two or more outdoor environments with a kind of leap frog effect to help explore larger geographic areas. I've found in my years as a NYC public school teacher that many kids' knowledge of the city only extends to the 10 square block area of their neighborhoods. Perhaps the creation of libraries of city-wide quicktime vr movies can provide some help in broadening their horizons. Certainly the kids can be taught the basics of the program as well and they could be turned loose to create their own portfolios. All you need is a digital camera and a tripod. Freeware and shareware VR programs are readily available. There is also a vast potential for literacy education as such movies can inspire students to write about the neighborhood scenes that they create and explore. Liz Sevcenko, from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, many years ago had introduced the term "Mapping Memories" to a group of CSD1 teachers with pencil and paper and Tom Beller from his excellent site "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" has employed such a technique digitally with a NYC base map. I felt that these movies that I was creating needed a home of their own, rather than being thrown into the chaotic mix of my blog, pseudo-intellectualism. Synchronicitiously came along another great Google For Educators innovation called Google Pages, which allowed me to do this as well as link to such helpful tools and widgets such as Google Maps and YouTube. It also allowed me to place an mp3 player below the image above for a musical dedication to my parents Sol and Eva Bellel and to my Uncle Hyman Genee

Sunday, June 1, 2008

QuickTime VR: Tanahey Park

Updated 6/1/08 with full featured vr tools that show zoom and pan and hot spots
from 11/23/07: A Quicktime VR Movie of Tanahey Park (western section)

After Thanksgiving my family took a trip to Boston. My daughter was visiting a camp friend who lives in Quincy. I was inspired by the geeky surroundings of the Hotel@MIT in Cambridge (run by Hilton and about 25% less than a Boston Hotel) That last proviso was for my father in case he was "listening" and I figured out the code to embed a vr movie. Actually I just copied it from another site and made adjustments. Probably any 16 year old kid here could do it blindfolded. Anyway it allows me to post many of the vr movies I've made that I had put on this site. The only problem is that the hot spots don't appear. The hot spots allow you to link to other vr movies. Good enough for now.
Tanahey didn't look like this 50 years ago and there was no hockey rink. Instead there were shuffleboard courts. I don't know why but I remember ringelevio home bases originating here. I was a lousy ringelevio player since I was pretty slow. I do recall, however, that I was a decent base runner by judging well where a ball was hit. I would also introduce the element of surprise by sliding on games played on concrete. I still have some scars.
As for fleet afoot Marty B and Marvin Kuperstein were among our fastest runners. Marvin was not only the fastest of us Jews, but he could beat any of the Italians and Irish and even the few black kids in the neighborhood.

Tanahey playground was named for local civic and political leader Martin F. Tanahey (1874-1930). Born and raised in this Lower East Side neighborhood, Tanahey held various public offices over 22 years. He served as chief clerk in the Labor Department of the State of New York and later became assistant appraiser of the Port of New York, the busiest port in the world for the first half of the 20th century. He also was an assistant government appraiser in President Woodrow Wilson's administration. In 1922, Tanahey was elected to the Board of Alderman from District 1, which includes the Lower East Side, and remained an alderman the rest of his life. Tanahey was a chief lieutenant of Democratic Party leader Thomas F. Foley (1852-1925), a saloonkeeper and politician associated with Tammany Hall for whom nearby Foley Square is named. Martin F. Tanahey died of pneumonia at his home at 177 Cherry Street in 1930.