How much can you do in a single hour?
Could you create a fully produced, edited, coherent, and engaging movie? Well, our students can.
Students can create fully finished cinematic jams in under an hour, recording, editing, and sharing with a single device. One of the amazing abilities that technology gives us is the power to harness the work of a fully staffed high-level movie production team, and to direct it to do your bidding. Students here at CFHS used iPads and iMovie to create these gems. This means that students spend less time messing about with technology, and more time generating and refining ideas, collaborating with one another, and learning content.
The key is to emphasize content, knowledge, and insight over production values. One way that teachers can do that implicitly is to spend much more time helping students to encounter and learn new information, and develop ideas and plans, and drastically reduce the amount of time that students actually have their hands on the technology tools. Hence, the single-period video: give students an iPad, and iMovie, and a single hour to get the shooting and editing done. (Of course many of them spent hours of time discussing ideas and planning before they got to production.)
Below are some funny, insightful, and quickly produced videos that our bolts teachers have caused our students to produce:
Carissa Boyd, Megan Kirts, and Gary Thompson’s students created trailers to recap major units of study to help students remember them for the AP U.S. History test:
Melissa Lewis’s students scripted and filmed “Crash Course” videos about their novels:
However, we also have teachers with superpowers. Here, as a special treat, is the trailer Carson Wright made in 12 minutes during our workshop - a preview of a heart-warming (and hysterically funny) love story between man and machine-learning algorithm, “Hey, Siri:”
Let this idea simmer over the summer, and let me know if you’d like support to launch it in your own class!
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