Coming together

A lot has been going on over the past week or so with my moviemaking project.

First, I worked again with the 5th grade teacher whose students were doing the simplifying fractions music video. We had to go to school a half day on Saturday so I suggested we work on the movie. Her kids loved it. They came up storyboards to explain the steps in simplifying the fractions. After they did storyboards, we filmed the shots, with the kids running the camera, directing and recording everything they did. They did such a good job. Having played with the editing software the week before, they had a good grasp on how everything would come together. We got all our scenes shot except for a few extras. The kids were amazing. They were so focused, that the teacher and I remarked that we could have left the room and they would have kept on working.

Today I spent some time editing the rough cut of the video. We decided that I would do the editing for this one so that we could finish the project quickly This incremental approach to introducing the kids to video seems to be working. The teacher and I have another project planned where the students will make their own science videos from scratch in small groups. I'll post the final fractions video here when it is finished.

In other areas, I am about to start my 3-day workshop on moviemaking for teachers with flip video cameras. I will do some touch ups on the planning tomorrow, but the basic plan is this.

day 1 - brief introduction to the cameras, movimaking terms and editing software.
day 2 - storyboarding, scripting, and editing software.
day 3 - managing student projects and lesson/project plan ideas.

Finally, I am about to get final approval for my longer moviemaking project planning workshop. I am going to hold the workshop on our March 30th workday. The plan is to hold a three-hour session to plan a unit/project using moviemaking. I will start with standard course of study goals and work up through lesson plans, rubrics and logistics. Teachers who attend this workshop will need to have some familiarity with using video cameras and editing software. I will hold a one-hour workshop in the morning for those who are interested but have not done a moviemaking class before.