Youtube and new groups

With the first stories done I wanted to have the students look at all videos that were done and then write a reflection.  The one problem I had was finding an easy way to show the videos.  Enter Youtube!!  I found connecting the IPad a little too cumbersome and the Airserver that I had been using has been blocked in our school and I can't connect through that anymore so I went to my Youtube account that I had started many years ago and had forgotten about.  Now here is my attempt to link them to this page:

Our last step will be to put all these stories together to make one news cast with a couple of hosts.

This has led to new groups and new stories.  After watching and looking at the feedback from my class I have decided to make the groups a little smaller.  The groups of 5 students made it difficult for everyone to feel involved.  So we will be trying groups of 4 where each student gets to pick a partner and then I put the groups together.  I will also be working with a small group of students to be my hosts of the news show and hopefully bring life to each story.

First News Stories

Spring Break came a little too quickly in my class.  Things go fast during the school year and with these news stories time seems to fly by.  The students and myself have learned alot during this process and the growth continues.  I had the students turn in their first news stories.  After reviewing them I noticed that they generally needed more editing.  As the teacher, I thought that I had given them most of the tools to be successful.  We had covered what news stories look like. I had created an example for them to follow.  We went over specific skills and practiced filming.   Once the news stories were turned in there was a lack of organization within the story.  Generally they had no beginning, middle and end.  Most teams had to go back and create an introduction and ending to the story.  Some groups had to go back and redo the middle of the story because they didn't tell a story but just spoke of random things or just interviewed people with no context. 

As you can see from this video that the students were asked to go and learn about what has happening in a different classroom where they were studying Pandemics.  They were suggested to go and talk to students in the class but also show what they worked on.  Instead they basically just interviewed a few students and didn't really capture the ideas in of the projects in the class.

Every group ended up needing to work on the news story a little more.  After the break we will review the news stories so we can all learn and make any follow up news stories that much stronger.

Teamwork!!

Finally the first assignments came in which were mock interviews so that the students can get a good feeling for interviewing other people.  Creating questions, finding a good location, using the green screen were all features that the students struggled with at times.  Editing video on the IPad also was a challenge as lots of students hadn't ever tried editing video before.  One of the criteria I assigned was adding in a voice over which many students again had a lot of trouble figuring out how to do it.  All of these problems though seemed to figure themselves out as long as I gave them time to play around with it and showed them a few little tips.

 The main struggle for the class was teamwork or groupwork.  In many cases in my past group work ended up where students either divided up the work or just worked on a whole project together at the same time.  Usually one or two members of the group take the lead and organize everyone else and sometimes even just do all the work.  With this assignment the students were really dependent on each other and often had no control over the other students.  Students said they wanted to film and then struggled to keep the camera still, or the ones who wanted to interview but couldn't remember the questions really started causing problems within the group.  At the same time those students who like to take control and just want to do it all, couldn't just do that.  We started with defined roles of each group member but then for some groups they couldn't just keep to one role and needed to help out in other areas.  Creating this mock interview really created a situation where teams had to learn how to work with different personalities and not just in a superficial way.  They successful groups began communicating and compromising; listening and helping to finish the job.  Arguments and frustration arose during the assignment but they slowly started building tolerance for each other and began using the skills that each member had. 

Our news stories have now been assigned and I decided to keep groups together for one more assignment before I mix them up so that they can show me that they have learned about the people the work with and attempt to make the next assignment run more smoothly.

Sample news story

In the coming weeks the class now will be starting real news stories within our school. Items such as lit circles in classrooms, litter within the school, Olympics units, as well as getting to know you pieces with staff and people inside our school are all going to be planned.  To get the students ready for this I decided to put together a sample video with clips I took when our school put together a pancake breakfast. It gives the students a general idea of the expectations.

Sample Video

The challenge so far has been finding the right way to have them edit their videos.  Putting students into groups and having them cooperate to edit has been a huge challenge so far.  They are learning how to work together and give up control on a project.

Newscasting ups and downs

We are back at it in the new year with a strong focus on getting the newscasting started.  Good news is our VP has come by with lots of great ideas for stories or ways we can get a message across to our school.  Within the class we have started practice interviews so that we can learn how to use the Ipads to film and edit.  I started using Airserver to try to screencast the Ipad to the projector but am learning that these types of programs are not consistent.  I had it working perfectly every day until the day I needed it and of course it wouldn't connect.  Trouble shooting is not fun in front of 26 students so I had to find other things for students to do.  Hopefully on the next post I can put in the mock interviews and the story ideas for our upcoming Newscast.