What Excites Me

For the last year and a half, we've been making Moviemaker videos combining narration, still photos and music. As with most education experiments, we started knowing very little and were working from hunches.

What we figured from the start:

The more prepared students are before they start creating their videos, the more efficient they'll be and the better their products would be. To this end, we used storyboards and scripts, and students showed these to us as part of preproduction work.

The less time we spent teaching kids how to use the technology, the better.I figured most kids wouldn't get most parts of how to use moviemaker, convert the final product to movie file, save it in the right place, etc. And we did have a lot of problems with this early on. The bulk of the problems, though, were about saving, so the for the last assignment, we just gave a primer on saving and gave NO tutorial for Moviemaker. As we circulated, we coached students as they needed it; many, many students figured out how to use the software on their own.

Aha moment:

Working with a second language student, I saw he had copied and pasted much of his script from another source. I asked him to highlight the most important ideas, which he did. This showed me he had some comprehension of what he was reading. Next, I asked him what images he could find that would best help explain the ideas he had underlined. Next, we talked about the order and pacing of the images. Suddenly, I realized this was sounding very much like a rhetoric lesson. The more I thought about the conversations I was having with students, the more parallels I saw between composition of these videos and written composition. One of the things we're talking about now is standardizing a vocabulary for both, so that skills transfer.

Aha moment #2::

When students read their scripts aloud, they recognize both errors and poor quality of writing. Many, many students spontaneously revised their scripts as they were recording them; this was completely unprompted and unexpected. Now we see the value of the recording as a tool for students in their own revisions.

More on this topic later...