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.