After having played around with Movie Maker for the first time in my life, I have realised that it isn't quite as hard as I first imagined. If I can do it, I am sure any upper primary school student can do it too. It would be an engaging way to tell a story, requiring a similar thought process to writing a story. It might engage the student who may not see literacy as their strongest side, teaching them the ideas behind a text and for them to express it in the shape of the digital story. It is time consuming at first though and to have a whole class fiddle around with it would require extensive access to computers. Of course you could divide the work up in teams where certain students do certain jobs, filming, interviewing and putting it together, where each students could work in the areas that suits them.
Creating voki's can also be quite fun and at times useful with the limitations of photographing students in schools today. It is quite a slow process to make one and might be best left as a carrot once other work has been completed. It could be incorporated in arts and would make a great presentation or assembly item.
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6 years ago
I like your suggestions for using Movie Maker, Sara. This is a program I only recently learnt how to use and yes I think it would be an enormously engaging task for the students. Dividing the process up into sections for different groups would be great and I am really drawn to the idea of students storyboarding a film project as an extended literacy task. Filmmaking involves scriptwriting, set design, performance, music, direction, using technology - a lot of things that appear across the learning areas. Definitely something I'll be looking into.
ReplyDeleteYes, finished digital stories are deceptively simple - as we said in class, it might well take students months of work to create a polished digital story just a couple of minutes long. But as Matt points out, students are practising a very wide range of skills in the process, including, of course, a whole swathe of multiliteracies.
ReplyDeleteI think making a digital story will be engaging for the children and at the end of the task they will have something to be proud of. For the teacher however I'm sure it will be very time consuming and alot of hard work.
ReplyDeleteI'll add my voice to the others above. I have used Movie Maker a few times and really enjoyed the process. My eldest was getting experience of it when he was 8 (about 2 years ago). It does involve a range of skills, but since all kids like movies it is highly engaging, and for all we know there could be budding directors in the class.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem I have found in kids trying to make their own movies, is not the technical aspect (which they pick up very quickly), but rather coming up with a good story to begin with. One way around this is to suggest a parody of an existing story (e.g. as Shrek was a parody of Sleeping Beauty).
That's a good point, Simon, and one that was picked up quite well in a somewhat different context - do you remember the podcast about podcasting by the 3rd grade students in the US? What I really liked about it was the fact that it dealt with all kinds of more traditional literacy issues, not just the technical aspects. I think you're absolutely right to suggest that kids will need help with the things kids have always needed help with - coming up with a narrative, sorting out plot details, etc, etc, BEFORE they get into actually making the movie.
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