Voting on Student Videos

Our students have submitted their videos for the annual Digital Video Awards, and I thought it might be exciting to collect some votes from outside the school community. The kids have worked very hard on them, some on their own time outside of school, just because they wanted to. We have removed the credits from some of them for student privacy reasons, but apart from that their videos are original.

I know this is one of the busiest times of the year as we all rush towards the end of the school year. Do have a look it you get a chance. Voting is open until Tuesday or until we reach 200 votes on this poll.

http://abclrc.polldaddy.com/s/abc-dva-2013

Thank you and have a great week!

Jennifer 

DVA Voting and Tickets

We have now officially closed voting on the DVA Videos. Thank you to everyone who voted on them! Tickets are available in both Secondary offices as well as the Upper Primary Office. Bring your tickets along for free refreshments on the night of the event.

Flipping the Learning-Creating Videos in WoW

Our club met up again yesterday, but a lot has happened in the course of this last week. The students have been working at their quests every chance they get and some are now at level 20! I won't mention what level I am at.  They have learned how to get around, fly on griffins, take trains and boats, and use tunnels. They are way ahead of me now. Does that worry me? Not a bit, it is exactly what I hoped would happen. My students are furious and relentless about their WoW work.

So far we have only begun to use the blog. The skill is new to most of them and I want to make sure they are comfortable with it before introducing the readings and reflections. Soon after our first lesson, I realised that my carefully planned unit would need a major revamp. They were way past much of what I had planned for them. If only they were that way about all their school work....I am pleased to mention that the directed teaching has been minimal and I haven't spent hours putting online tutorials together either. They have been directing their own learning with very little support and sharing new skills with the group.

It is for this reason I thought it only fit to have them share some of their discoveries with us by recording using the WoW Mac Options. We could have gone further, narrated the vids, rendered them after careful editing in iMovie, or done screencasts with Quicktime or Screencast-o-matic, but all except one (which was done as 4 separate vids) are unedited footage. The learning has flipped with no upset to those involved. My students are now my WoW teachers and I retain my position as facilitator, the setter of assignments, readings etc...How I envy the speed with which they learn....again if only they could do that, or feel motivated to do so in all their regular lessons.

Did I mention a 12th grader asked to come on board (a level 84 12th grader!!!)? We now have an expert in the midst, which brings me back to my earlier statement, something about students as teachers. The roles have certainly flipped, leaving me free to learn alongside them, to learn from them and facilitate the journey ahead.

UN Week-Millennium Goal Videos

The ABC celebrated UN Week during the last week of October.

For the LRC that meant aiding kids with their Millennium Goal videos and setting up a great display of articles from around the world.

The Videos

As component of their Life Skills work, students across the grades were asked to produce a group video based on one of the UN Millennium goals,. They needed to research the goal, and find a way to get the message out to others, utilising a range of media which may have included:video clips, music, narration and photos.

Some groups opted to do interviews, others found powerful photographs for slide shows, while certain groups chose to record themselves acting out given roles and other decided a screen cast was the way to proceed. Many students chose to search Creative Commons sites for images, others used Google Advanced Search to access information and images. They brought in music to mix into their projects, on their iphones and ipods, brought in videos and photos they prepared at home and made good use of the LRC flip cameras,tripods iMacs when filming live footage and remixing their work.

It was fascinating to observe the students as they chose the digital tools that best suited their vision for the project, incorporating the web fluency and media skills they had learned over the last year or so,  while researching and resourcing their initiatives. These students each have a well developed digital toolkit to draw on, one which will increase as the school year progresses.