I’m at a workshop on how to make videos. We are housed, fed and taught in a glorious setting at Snowbird, Utah–resort country par excellence. I got to go because of a grant from the Utah Office of Education and other donors, because I’m a district arts representative.
It’s taught by SpyHop, a Utah educational entity funded from various sources, including the Utah State Office of Education, the Sundance Institute, the University of Utah, and the Salt Lake’s Mayor’s Office–and more.
This workshop teaches moviemaking for classroom teachers. It’s a whole week of carefully designed instruction, a lovely pedagogical model interlacing lecture with handson projects. The projects themselve are cleverly designed to build technology skills using projects teachers would really use:
- A public service announcement
- A book trailer
- Various interviewing styles
- A stop-motion project (think claymation without the clay)
- Simple movie making (the 8-shot movie, as they call it)
- More complex movie making, collaborating with a small group for writing, storyboarding, scripting, filming, editing, sound, and all the trimmings.
- Real-life hands-on problem-solving with cameras and computers–a whole course in itself.
The teaching is excellent–non-judgmental, supportive, specific. That in itself is excellent modeling for teaching this kind of project.
What I really love about this kind of work is that it’s yet another (brilliant) way of using arts to teach the academic core. The SpyHop folk showed a stop-action video made (with PlayDoh) by elementary kids, about the water cycle. The school compared former years’ science core tests scores with scores from students who had done moviemaking. The moviemakers scored higher by 25+ points. Why? Because they had to keep reviewing all the concepts constantly to make the project–plan it, write it, storyboard it, film it, edit it, and watch it, watch it, watch it! Take it home to Mom and Dad and watch it some more!
Well-designed arts projects for academic subjects do the very same thing. Now I know movie-making basics, enough to add this sizzling method to my other projects.
Thank you, SpyHop!
June 26, 2009 at 4:49 pm |
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June 26, 2009 at 4:51 pm |
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June 29, 2009 at 5:50 am |
Great post. I did something similar this year as my students and I became adequate at power point. What great teaching tools technology offers enabling children to become more fully engaged.
June 30, 2009 at 7:45 pm |
Interesting. I am curious as to what you are using to make these movies. Are you using the traditional camcorder or are you using a computer program such as imovie? The projects sound like a great way to get the students involved in their learning. It is also a fun activity. I remember making a movie for a high school English class. It was a blast!
July 2, 2009 at 1:30 pm |
Lindsay, I just wrote a post below on how we did the stop motion. We used digital camcorders for the other movie projects but we edited in Windows Movie Maker or Mac iMovie. Easily!
Cathy
July 2, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Cathy,
That sounds easy enough. I think it is something I would have to do myself first to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing before letting the students participate. What grade/grades did you do your project with? Did the students seem engaged and enjoy it?
July 2, 2009 at 1:19 am |
That class sounds really interesting. My daughter’s fourth grade class made stop-motion projects this year. They were studying colonial times and each group got to make a short video of a scene from that time period that interested them. I was impressed with the teacher’s creativity in designing the lesson and also with her patience in teaching a bunch of 10 year olds this very slow process. However, I think it was definitely worth it. My daughter gained so much from the experience, she still talks about it and can tell you just about anything about colonial times. I am thinking about how I can incorporate this type of thing into my highschool biology classroom, but I will definitely need a few lessons on it first.
July 2, 2009 at 1:27 pm |
Oddly, the stop motion turned out to be the easiest of all the projects. Basically you set up a digital camera on a tripod. Set it up to remain in one place. Then you take a picture, move objects a bit, take another, and so on. It can be very soothing work, I found out. You can change scenes but don’t move the camera during a particular sequence. For example, if you are doing a volcano eruption, don’t move the camera during the actual eruption, but you can move it to set up another sequence, such as watching rocks rolling down a hill. Then download all the pix to your computer and import them into Windows Movie Maker (or iMovie for Mac). Bring all the pix down into the movie sequence and set the duration to move quickly and run the movie. Cool!