Splicing Video into the Writing Process

This article/lesson plan was very interesting. I liked how the authors went through each step they took and told how they guided their students through the process without getting in the way of the students imaginations and ideas for their projects. I think it is important for kids to keep their ideas open and the more that a teacher refrains from voicing ideas and opinions on how to do something, the more creative children will be. The more freedom a child has to imagine, helps in brain development. I think it was neat how formal the kids had to be while filming. They donned fake mustaches and blazers to fit the part of real newscasters. By doing this, the kids were able to get excited about the project more. The more a teacher can involve different learning styles and equipment in lessons, the better for the children. I think it was also cool that they had a movie night where all of the parents came and watched their children's movies. Kids love when they can show something off to there parents and what better way to show off their creativity and also what they had learned about in school.  The writing aspect of this project is really helpful too. Its almost like tricking the students into doing a writing assignment. They are writing up things to say in the video but also it's reinforcing what they have learned in the class. It's a writing assignment but in a fun way. I think I will definitely use video production as a learning tool in my future classes.

Movie Making

I thought the movie making process was a lot of fun. I took a Video Film class back in high school and I really enjoyed it. I found myself remembering different techniques we had learned in that class and I felt like I could have made our shots really artsy. Amanda kind of took over the reins of the filming because she had told us that she had previous experience in the filming department, working on different skate boarding promotional videos and such. I felt like our group kind of just wanted to get the filming over with and go home so I was a little disappointed in what footage that we did get. It definitely could have been better, but for the sake of our project, I think that it will be sufficient. I hope that there will be enough footage for me to edit a good clip. After filming our commercial though, it made me realize how much I like working with the camera. I really was thinking about each shot and how we could have tweaked it to make it better. I think that I am going to sign up for a film making class or maybe just start doing it on my own, pending on how well I can navigate iMovie, since that is the only video editing software that I own. I also declared my Depth of Study as Arts and Technology so I know that I will be taking some kind of film class through my depth enphasis. I am greatly looking forward to learning about iMovie and to see what it is we will be able to do on the program.

3 Articles on Video Production

http://kidsvid.altec.org/nav_pages/teaching.html

This website is really great. It actually has lesson plans on there about how to teach kids how to use video production as a tool. This site has links to tips they have in which they further explain how to teach kids the video production process.

http://www.youthlearn.org/learning/activities/multimedia/video.asp

This website is a lesson plan on  the subject of video production for kids. I liked this site because the lesson plan is very detailed. I throughly enjoy when something is in depth and clear cut for me to understand so this lesson plan would be the one that i would choose to use. It gives a new little activity for each technique used in video production. I think that is cool because kids will need to know how to do each step separately so that they can be safe with the equipment. 

 http://www.teachertube.com/

I think this website is awesome. It is just like YouTube but for teachers and students. You could post videos, documents, pictures, or audio to the website and the best part about it is that a parent or teacher does not have to worry about the children stumbling onto a video or picture that is in any way graphic. I think, since the website is restrictive like that, this website would be a good resource to use in the classroom for students. If a teacher had the students make a video, this website would be a good one for them to post the video on. 

Evalutech

I loved this website. I thought this site was so helpful and will be helpful in the future when I sit down to figure out what to include in my teaching plans. There was all sorts of resources for math, language arts, social studies, and science enrichment. I liked the fact that each site that was recommended had a little summary added next to the link so the reader could figure out if that website would be worth it for them to visit. Also the fact that someone has done all of the digging and searching for you and all of the best websites are up on this page for a teacher to look through is amazing. I liked the search that they included on the site. That engine would be very useful if you needed to find a review for a certain subject. The search engine had a bunch of different criteria that you could choose from when searching, such as: keywords, subject, format, grade levels, and teachers name. Since there are so many options to narrow the search down to, you can get pretty specific when finding a review.  I noticed that SREB stands for "Southern Regional Education Board." I wonder if the information is specific solely to the Southern Regional Education Board or if there is another place for information specific to the Western states. The SREB looks like it belongs around the area of Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and east a ways. I wonder if there is something like this but for the west coast states and if it would be any different than this website. 

Copyright Laws

I know for a fact that the copyright law is broken all the time, and most of the time when people are unaware that they are breaking a law. Music, pictures, quotes, etc. are all used without correct permission all the time. This law will definitely affect my classroom teaching. I know that I will come across something amazing that I will want to use in my classroom, but I might not necessarily get to use it because of copyright laws. Worksheets will all have to be made by me, from a website that allows copies, or they will have to be from a book that allows copies made from it. Hopefully I will not run into a situation like that too often where I can't use an educational tool because it is copyrighted. I feel like when I was growing up, my teachers that I had were not worried about this at all. I'm not sure if the laws were less strict at the time or if it was something else, but I can remember getting many worksheets with direct text from books from my teachers. As far as software goes, I think there are enough grants out there and free legal downloadable software available to get me by in that department. I am not worried about not having software for my students to use. I liked how, on one of the articles about copyrights, they gave an example of a request for usage to the copyright holder. I think that will come in handy for me and for my student's use. 

Wikis

I thought editing wikis was super cool. I kind of felt smart after I posted it :) even though it wasn't anything very profound. I think because there is such a wealth of knowledge that can be found in wikis, because I had something to add to that wealth made me feel special. hehe. I can see how it would get unreliable. If anyone could put information online like that, it is not a very trustworthy source. I could have written something totally bogus and it would still be on the wiki that I posted on. I made sure to add a link to the information that I added and it was all relevant. I thought it was interesting when I went to post on Wikipedia, because I didn't have an account, they notified me that if I chose to post information without an account, then my IP address would be given out to anyone who wanted to know where that specific information I put down was. I didn't really know what an IP address was but I assumed that it gave a location to where my computer is at the time. I thought this was kind of strange. It scared me a little bit. I wouldn't really want everyone to know where I am at a certain time during the day. I kind of figured that the government could do such a thing at looking up someone's IP address, but not any random person. It seems like an invasion of privacy a little bit. So I made an account so that nobody can look me up. I am glad that joining Wikipedia was free. It made it even cooler to be on there editing things. 

Bridging the Digital Divide

I found this article to be a bit redundant of things we have talked about in class and maybe in another article we have read. In response to the location of the computers, I don't necessarily agree that a computer lab is not a good spot to place computers. I grew up with a computer lab in my school and it was in what we called "the Pod." About 6 or 7 classrooms surrounded the Pod so each classroom shared all of the computers in their specific Pod. The teachers would have to reserve time slots when their students were allowed to used the computers but when no class was using them, any student was allowed to use them freely. Swain and Pearson say that computer labs, "reinforce the idea that computers are simply “extra” or “special” instead of an integral part of the learning process." The way that we set up our lab made it feel like it was part of every class so it really was part of our learning process. Another point in the article that I didn't quite understand the benefit of was  when the authors were saying that it benefits the students when the computers that are in the classroom are located close to each other so that the students can share ideas. For me, this would just be a distraction. Also, if there are only 3 to 5 computers in the classroom, the children who are unable to use the computers would be extremely distracted. I think that I like the idea of a computer lab. It seems more economic for the school and also less distracting for the students.