Either allowing students to collect video footage with an inexpensive or old video recorder during recess and/or taking random footage of students throughout the first days of school will provide ample opportunities for initial video capture. The first week of third grade involves, among many other things, a review of literature “genres”. Seamlessly, we can incorporate a lesson on movie genres. This introductory week also includes an introduction to writing. Incorporating “storyboarding” into these first couple introductory writing lessons will increase student motivation to write and create. Another vital part of the first week of school is to establish the reason for being in school, and in particular, third grade. In the past, I have done this in the form of a written contract, which we then refer to later in the year, when learning becomes difficult and everyone needs a reminder as to why we are in school. However, brainstorming and storyboarding our ideas as a group then allowing each student to create an iMovie trailer about their own reason for being in school will be an even better way to do this. Always modeling first, students will help me create a trailer that will serve as the class contract!
Lynda.com’s iMovie essential training helped me understand the logistics of doing this. Garrick Chow demonstrated in the segment on “Moving a project to another Mac”, how to post an uploaded event to another hard drive, provided the hard drive is formatted correctly.
Ideally this hard drive will be connected wirelessly to all student computers. Students will then be able to choose their movie genre and begin storyboarding their reason for being in school. One of the great things about the iMovie trailers is that they are short and look impressive even with extensive user error, as is inevitable with 20 eight year olds creating movies for the first time. Posting and sharing these videos is still a dilemma, but one which I have a few months to solve. Here is an example.
I picked up the same thing from the training--how to move the Project and Event files to another drive. I've been doing a number of videos, and those source files have been growing. I finally ran out of space last week and had to go buy a hard drive to move my old work to.
ReplyDeleteI never would have guessed that my school work would, in under a year, take up more space than the music collection I've been gathering over the last 15 years.
Also, that trailer is great. That's definitely an up side to teaching primary school: your students will still get a giggle out of it. My students are too jaded and would just roll their eyes. Ah well.
I also had an "aha" moment when Garrick talked about the external drives. I have noticed that the files are piling up and I need to free up space on the laptop so it can function at its optimal potential.
ReplyDeleteLove the trailer, Jennifer! I think Ms. Williams' 3rd grade class will have more fun while they are learning than they ever thought they could. My mind is racing as to how to incorporate the iMovie in my class as well as the other technologies. My next group of students are in for a real treat.
Okay, the Voki is creepy. I had a dozen tabs open and there's this random voice talking to me about her blog.
ReplyDeleteAnd her eyes follow my mouse, reminding me of the old xeyes. Again, very creepy.
(And yes, I totally did just link to Wikipedia. Ha!)
I noticed in your video that you used the Ken Burns effect a lot. I know that the tutorial taught me how to reframe the effect so that you can move to or away from the picture. Very cool!
ReplyDelete