Creating a Video

In designing my lesson for the video assignment I had students make a movie. They did in camera editting and it was great. The students took one week to make their short films on the Punic Wars. How wonderful they all were.

The authentic problem was for the student to create a movie teaching a 3rd grade class about the Punic Wars since it is apart of their curriculum as well. Using the webquest I designed last semester; but changing it to have in camera editting to shorten the time needed in class was wonderful. The produces made me so proud. They created treatments, then story boards, practiced and finally filmed. Wow! They are good enough to go on YouTube.

WebQuest

     Webquests are a great way to have students use the web in order to learn new material or reienforce already learned material. The theory is that the teacher does all or his/her offloading to the web. This is great in theory; but in practice it is something very different. When using a webquest I will give this advice be patient with you students because they never read the directions.
     Most people do not read the directions on the bact of a box of easy- mac they just heat and sprinkle the fake cheese. This is what happened to me durng my webquest activity. I had to constantly guide my students answeing questions about the directions. If I could do this lesson all over again I would do the modeling, coaching and fading as explained by Vygostsky in Mind and Society instead of trying to teach two skills at once.

Thinking Games

Today I had my students use a video game to assist them in learning. How did I do that? I had them play the video game Civilizations. Civilizations is a simulation game that has an authentic problem ( creating your own empire from a tribe of people) from the ground up. The user is required to build a city's infrastructure, from personal homes, to bridges, to monuments for the Gods, to ships for trading. They are then required to use the variables given to them to react to trails that they will face as they build their civilization. My students were playing against each other and they have been broken up into teams of three all trying to beat the other teams within their classroom. It is wonderful to see them use what they have learned in class about the ancient peoples of that time and what it took for their civilizations to become successful and how they in turn have to use that previous knowledge and apply that to the game. It is a wonderful culminating acitvity for the end of the year.  I just wonder who is actually going to win. They are all so into the game.

Video in the classroom

     When we walk into a classroom and see students watching a movie we immediately think that the teacher is slacking that day and needs to relax. We rarely believe that true learning can come from a movie such as Robin Hood or The Messenger. The truth of the matter is that it can. For our children of the 21st Century we have to give a visual representation of all that we teach them. They have to understand how what they are learning in the classroom is situated in their reality. This is what videos bring into the classroom, especially for history when concepts of the past seem to not relate to the present. The use of video is medium to bridge the past with the present. It also helps them to understand the importance of people, documents, and events of the past and how they in essence helped to shape our future. So the next time you walk into a classroom where the teacher is showing a video ask why the students are watching a video vs. assuming it is mind junk.

As Eisner says literacy "is the ability to encode or decode meaning in any of the forms of representation used in a culture to convey or express meaning."