In addition to teaching English, I am the theatre teacher at
my school. This is show week; I cannot wait for Sunday morning when it is all
done and I can look forward to tearing it all down on Monday morning. Between
now and then… no healthy sleep, no free time, and not a lot of focus on
anything but the show. Rehearsal tonight was “OK,” but not great. Dress
rehearsal tomorrow… ugh. But once it is all finished, I will be free for a few
weeks until we start the musical rehearsals at Christmas.
Right now I am feeling a little overwhelmed. This class is
asking a lot more out of time that I don’t have than the previous courses and I
am not finding the free time during this season to do well. I have a student
teacher this year, and her first lesson is tomorrow. I am actually really
excited, partially because I did not have to make plans, but also because I am
legitimately enjoying being a teacher to a teacher. I really want to push her
to be a better beginning teacher than I was, and I am planning to incorporate a
lot of multimedia and technology to help us both out.
Our students are going to be making commercials in a couple
of weeks, and that means a lot more hands-on technology than my students
generally get in class. Honestly, I am not really sure if “my human” (Ashlynn)
knows how to storyboard, film, and edit, but she will learn. I am torn between
allowing the students to use the website www.goanimate.com
to make cartoon commercials, or if I will only let them use traditional commercial
filming techniques. In order to make my human and I successful and to carry out
our GAME plan of making successful commercials, I will need to make sure that
all of my technology is prepared: cameras (we have four flip cams), mobile
laptop lab, and a word processing program (in our case Microsoft Word). I would
like to see if my colleague Brandon Nicklas will help us in our filming
endeavors by allowing us to make a “documentary” of him making a commercial.
Since Nicklas is the televideo teacher, he would lend gravitas to the process
and the students are used to seeing his work with the morning announcements.
Ashlynn and I will lead the students through brainstorming, script writing, storyboarding
and then finally filming and editing. Last week a lot of my Walden classmates
suggested various websites that I could use in order to allow voting for the
best commercial, but I have yet to choose which site to use.
Once my life slows down after we close Saturday night, I
will be off to commercials and planning for my reality show pilot (which I
would love to tell you about, but am not sure what happens if any of you steal
my idea).
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ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDeleteI think your commercial activity is fun and creative! In the past, I have had my students create skits and perform them which is a slightly similar concept to the commercial although commercials usually have a persuasive side to them trying to get the audience to buy something or check something out. As we have been learning about UDL it is important to keep in mind those diverse learners that Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer discuss(Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009). It seems as though all of your students will be working towards creating their commercials. How are you going to differentiate the activities within this process to make all learners successful and allow them to experience the process according to their abilities?
References
Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
Aneta
Hi Dan,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I'd like to thank you for sharing the goanimate website last week. For my fast-working students, I put them in a computer rotation this week and had them create short scenes from Of Mice and Men using the goanimate.com. They were hilariously cheesy but the students had a lot of fun editing and presenting. We had a face-off of pairs of videos until we got to the final two videos that the classes decided were the best. I use the website polleverywhere.com because it is easy to use and the kids feel excited when I tell them to take out their cell phones and vote, but to keep it on the down low that we are using cell phones in class. Ha ha.
Chapter 5 of our course text included a section on Gardner's Multiple Intelligences (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009, p. 124), which got me to thinking about your commercial assignment. First of all, it sounds like a very interactive and engaging project, which would benefit students who are strong in bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and linguistic intelligence. The universal design for learning (UDL) we read about this week “suggests that teachers can remove barriers to learning by providing flexibility in terms of options for materials, methods, and assessments” (p. 117). Do you have any students who are uncomfortable communicating on camera and prefer to be behind the scenes? Are students allowed to choose particular roles for the production of the commercials, and if so, will you have different measures to assess the student roles?
It sounds like a great assignment and I hope you post examples of the finished product when the students are done! Happy Thanksgiving,
Regan
Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.