Still making movies with kids. Still loving it.
Still slightly amazed at how quickly most kids have taken to it. Makes me think back to last year when my students were writing their DARE essays. Essays are clearly not something my students spent time reading, which made writing them very difficult. In constrast, my students have been exposed to a great deal of video. I suspect that is why they found this so easy.
And it was the kiddos who had struggled most this year, the ones who still haven’t grasped that ALL their documents are stored in their My Documents folder, that made the biggest gains. So many of those kids are the ones who actually got hold a digital camera and used Legos or Bionicles, candy bars or army guys or rubber ducks as their subjects. They took photo after photo of these subjects in different positions. They found a way (CD-ROM, thumb drive, Blackboard, bringing in the camera) to get the photos to school. They narrated the entire video, usually with different voices for different characters. They searched through our collection of royalty-free music to find just the right sound tracks.
All the children seem to enjoy this unit, but these kids are especially delighted and amazed by what they have created. They sit and watch the video again and again. They keep going in and making small tweaks to make the video just right. They are focused and animated in a way I haven’t seen all year, although I glimpsed it during our web page unit.
My next step is to put the videos in a location where the classroom teachers can reach them, and offer the viewing of the videos as an activity for those last few days of school. I hope the teachers are as delighted and amazed as the children and I have been. I hope it sends the teachers off on the summer vacation thinking, “I wonder how I can use student-made videos in my curriculum next year?” I’ll be asking myself the same question.
Nice post! You have said it very well. Keep going.
Hi Susan,
Thank you very much for putting such a thought provoking post out there. I am a masters student in education at the University of Michigan, and I am really finding “teacher’s blogs” like yours exceptionally useful because they help me to learn about so much.
In terms of your post, I think that what you have presented here in this post kis an effective way to reach out and effect the different types of learners that comprise your classroom. Not every student will find success or will be interested in writing a traditional essay, and the sign of a truly effective educator is one who designs creative activities to allow students to become interested in the assignments at hand. This is what you have done with your video assignment. And I think that your success is noted in your own words: “And it was the kiddos who had struggled most this year, the ones who still haven’t grasped that ALL their documents are stored in their My Documents folder, that made the biggest gains.”
One final thought that I had about your post is regarding your “next step;” you mentioned that you want to put the videos in a location where they are accessible to teachers. My suggestion is, why not allow other students to utilize these videos? Maybe these students will watch the videos and their teachers will find an experience similar to yours in that the students open up with the creation of the videos in ways that they did not when writing traditional essays. Just a thought to ponder…keep up the great work!
Katie Z,
Thanks for your suggestions. I need to figure out how to do that without filling our servers. One solution may be the You Tube channel we just created for our school. I wouldn’t put yearbook style videos up there, but as we move into student-created topical videos, I think other kids would be interested in using them.