Rushton Hurley and Jim Sill shared their strategies for doing multimedia projects with students. When assigning the topic for the project, they choose "framing" questions for the project. These are what questions you want them to ask themselves while working. They let the students watch videos filmed by others to see what they may have noticed as a strength or weakness in filming. Here is a great resource for them to use with many videos to see: Lightbulbs collection. The students were then able to generate lists with the teacher regarding "strengths" and "weaknesses" they noted in the films they watched, such as: distracting background, low sound, boring questions were asked, humor made it more interesting, etc. Based on these lists they could then generate the checklist of preparation steps they needed for their project. As teachers, they certainly could have just done a mini lesson on good filmmaking and "dos" and "don'ts" but because the students discovered these things on their own they understood them better. An example of one of Jim's student projects was when they had to learn about sonnets. The students were not really excited about this. But Jim assigned them sonnets in small groups and after studying (see detailed description of project here). He allowed them to represent the sonnet in a short video with audio voice over. They could represent the words figuratively as they interpreted it. This is an example of the results:
Would you rather your students show comprehension this way? Or by answering questions on a written test? I think the proof is in the product! Give multimedia a try!
1 comment:
Rushton Hurley is one of my favorite people. I spent talking his head off at the last conference I attended. It is amazing what he does with children.
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