Video Killed the Radio Star

Nothing excites students much more than seeing me roll the iPad cart into my classroom, and hearing me say the words “today we’ll be making videos”. Because we use iPad’s we have mostly worked with iMovie. This year my students made book talks using iMovie. In groups of 2-3 they created a script, and then used video clips, voice overs, and images to tell the audience about a book they read and enjoyed independently in class. Because we were talking about audience and author’s purpose, I asked them to make sure that their video contained informational, persuasive, and entertaining portions. Here is an example from students, Kyndal and Lyndie:

Untitled from Ms Zuckerman on Vimeo.

The year before I presented the students with a news scenario. I was teaching author’s purpose and tone, so I had students pretend to be a news crew reporting the story. Each group had to report on the story using vocabulary that enhanced their assigned tone. For example, some had to take a positive spin on the story, while others had to be negative. Some were neutral, while others sensationalized. They recorded their videos news report style, and we watched them in class, and voted to decide which group did the best job enhancing their assigned tone.

Powtoon and Animoto have been favorites of my students over the past couple of years. Powtoon has been used for reading projects to add a new chapter to the end of a book, or recreate a scene from a book using animation. Animoto is usually my student’s top choice when I ask them to make book trailers. Here is an example: Sydney’s Animoto Book Trailer

I am really interested in using the “Mission Impossible” template in Powtoon. I think it could be a really fun way to introduce a project, or to share with students what needs to be done when out on School Related leave, or a personal day. The “Five Facts” template could be fun for the beginning of the school year. Students could create them by writing five facts about themselves. They could be shared in Schoology, and students could view each others. It could be a homework assignment to have students find commonalities between themselves and their classmates.

Jing would be a great tool for teaching students the technology skills that they need to really be successful in the 6th grade. 6th graders have enough of a hard time using organization as is, and with Henrico’s 1 to 1 laptop program, students who don’t understand how to navigate all the new tools, are going to struggle. Jing could be used to show students how to submit work online, work collaboratively in google drive, organize their work and notes using digital files, or use a new technology tool that the teacher is incorporating. Jing is King for tutorials.

Finally, I have always felt that stop-motion video has such a dreamy, emotional quality to it. I would really like to incorporate some of the tools for stop motion suggested by Richard Byrne. Such as, CommonCraft, Jelly Cam, and O Snap. Stop motion is a great way to show process. It could be used to show students putting together a piece of artwork. It could also be a really awesome way to document the school’s garden over time, or to teach students how a story goes from story-boarding to shot by shot production.

There are so many new tools out there. But cool things can also be done with some tried and true tools, such as powerpoint. This is a “video” one of my students created using powerpoint, that I thought was very well-done (and quite humorous as well!). You will want to download it to your computer, as looking through it on Google Drive does not allow for the audio to play. Kaile’s PowerPoint “Video”

References:

Byrne, R. (2015). Six styles of video classroom projects-a handout. Free Technology for Teachers. Retrieved at: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2015/05/six-styles-of-classroom-video-projects.html#.V20z__krLIW