Students learn social, language arts and math skills from Farewell Video Project
Educators are constantly finding ways to incorporate academic concepts, creativity, and of course fun into their lesson plans. A team of educators from Stanley Knowles Middle School in Canada implemented a video production project with VideoStudio that helped students improve their social, language arts and math skills.
For the second year, Wayne Wyke, Janet Wilson, and Tara Smith decided to lead a team of students and create a gift for graduating 8 th graders. This year, they wanted to do something different by creating a Farewell DVD with video editing software. Wyke, a computer teacher who has experience with VideoStudio, found the software suitable for the Farewell DVD project. He said that, “VideoStudio 7 allows individuals the potential to make any project look and sound fabulous. There is no limit to what can be done.”
Before implementing the project, the three educators contemplated on how to create an assignment that challenged talented students to practice their social, language arts and math skills. After coming upon the Farewell DVD idea, they knew that this project would fulfill their criteria. For instance, students applied their social and organizational skills by approaching faculty and other students to be featured on the video as well as construct interview questions for their interviewees. To develop math skills the students needed to figure out how many people they could interview within the 15 minute time constraint of the video.
A team of eight students were chosen to head the project and they decided to call it “Flashback 2004.” These students, like professional producers, met to share ideas, brainstorm and were in charge of developing a storyboard. On top of creating the skeleton for the video, they were accountable for gathering their interview sources as well as capturing special events on camera.
Due to time constraints, the video editing portion of the project was accomplished by the team of teachers who also created a draft of the video with the software. The actual editing of the video produced quick results because of how easy VideoStudio is to use, according to Wyke.
The team of students and teachers were proud of the final product. In fact, “Many of the parents, students and staff members were very impressed,” said Wyke. Overall, Wyke agreed that VideoStudio is a valuable application with a small learning curve that can help teachers’ add pizzazz to their curriculum.
To see the Farewell video project , go to: http://www.wsd1.org/stanleyknowles/Videos/Videos.htm |
