|
|
Background: I have been excited about technology for as long as I can remember. In fifth grade, the highlight of my week was when we had 30 minutes to play Oregon Trail on the Apple Macintosh. I dreamed of having my own computer. As I progressed through the grades, technology progressed as well. I was constantly amazed and drawn in by the new innovations. Now, as a teacher I want to ignite the same fire inside my students that is still burning strong inside me. At our school, the average student has better technology at home then they do at school. I want to teach students how to use the technology of the future, not how to deal with the technology of the past. |
Why we made this video: We chose to enter the eimakeover.com contest for many reasons. First, our school does not have any Interwrite products. I personally have not even been to a school that has them. I seriously have not even seen one in real life! We have heard so many good things, and seen them in action in so many internet videos and lessons. Also, I wanted the students to have the chance to display their talents and share their personalities outside of the normal classroom setting. We wanted to show other teachers and students that great things can be done with whatever technology you currently have. We did not want to make fun of the technology that we have, or complain that we need more. Our class has a great desire to have more technology so that we may continue to use our creativity to learn more and to express ourselves. How we made this video: Creating the Einstruction/Interwrite video was a great experience. We chose the song "Handlebars" by Flobots because the music helped with the emotions we wanted to convey throughout the video. We did not want the typical video making fun of teachers, making them prudish, mean, dorky, and out of touch…we wanted a real teacher! We also did not want to portray our current classroom as boring, because it is anything but that! All 32 of my students helped make the video. Twenty of my students volunteered to appear in the video. Since class time could not be used to create this video, students volunteered to come in during recess and lunchtime, as well as coming in after school. The students learned to create Pivot animations and we held a contest on which animations would be featured in our video. A quote contest was also held in our classroom to be used in the conclusion of the video. In our video, we did not want the students to "act", we wanted to feature their own unique personalities and to have their creativity shine through. Thus, the students helped to choose shots and storylines and did what they do best…be themselves! They also chose what profession they held up in their individual signs. It was a challenge to show the technology that we use in the classroom because most of it is software driven and we did not want to infringe on any Copywrites. Thus, our lyrics talked about almost 20 different ways we currently use technology in our classroom. Our video ends with the big picture…the future of our youth. It shows the careers that they strive to have, all of which are dependent on technology. Equipment/Software used: Many people have emailed to ask us what equipment we used to make the video. They have been surprised to find out that our equipment was not much different than theirs. -Gateway T2310 Laptop (personal equipment) -Sony Camcorder DCRA-C171 (school equipment) -Sennheiser Microphone E835 (personal equipment) -M-Audio MobilePre preamp/audio interface (personal equipment) -Sony Acid Music Studio 7.0 (personal software) -Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 7 *also used each week for BLAST OFF! (personal software) -Adobe After Effects CS3 (personal software) -Particle Illusion 3.0 (personal software) -Corel Paint Shop Pro x2 (personal software) -Pivot (personal software) -Backgrounds - a black tablecloth and the overhead screen -best students in the world |