My Support class… What can I say? I’m nervous about what they are doing to me. I’m worried about what I’m doing to them. I’m afraid of what they’ll do to a sub in my absence. But I can’t let any of those things stop me from doing what needs to be done. So, after only the briefest conversation about this with my friend and (what I consider) a failed attempt to look at three sample videos last week, we jumped in today and started down the road to making a simple, simple video.
Captions
We worked through three images today, two tests as a class and one final done independently. I gathered the next four days worth of images, giving us five images by Friday. Each image shows something important on my campus: a well-known project, class competition, class meeting, the campus at break, and a campus landscape shot. Each day, every student writes a caption that explains what that image tells us about our school. The following day, I present The Best Of yesterday’s captions (through a Photoshop setup so their captions look legit). After a quick vote, we press on to the next image. I hope that the captions will get better and better each day, showing more insight into what message the visual communicates.
Script
At the end of the week, we have five images and five captions. That day, small groups turn those captions into a script by filling in any additional details, moving smoothly from one idea to the next, tacking on an intro and conclusion, and deciding the order of shots through some brief storyboarding. Punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and sentence combining will factor into all this somehow. Basketball Review Monday if we stay on task.
Video
By next Wednesday, we should end up with some short videos about our campus, things similar to what’s posted over at Next Vista (full disclosure, I’m heavily involved with Next Vista).
Once we’ve worked through this process as a class, my hope is to get students working on their own video about their community, using our creations as models. We’ll work on imagining what pictures they want, slapping together another storyboard, then figuring out how to go about getting those shots. Taking single captions and turning those into a full script will be a huge component and we’ll present all of our videos to each other, voting on those that should be developed further, edited, and finally submitted to Next Vista.
I see so many different ways this ties into my subject area, but the most important aspect of this project will be the sense of accomplishment and pride in their work I hope this promotes. I’m also going for some classroom community which is sorely missing. They have not bonded the way I usually get my other classes to do.
I’m nervous. I’m worried. I’m afraid. But let’s see what they’ll do. That simply must be the way I approach this class.