About our videomaking

One of the biggest tasks at class that required the use of ICT (Information and communication technology) was to have the 3rd grades make their own videos in groups of ca 5 people. It was interesting for all of us teachers, because not one of us had done it before! I knew how it's usually done and what steps we have to go through but even I had never done it in practice. So it was great opportunity and all of us were excited.

Brainstorm's results on the smartboard.

The videos' function was to present the South Range Elementary School to the Finnish students of the same age. Students had to have ideas of what is important and special in their school from the Finnish children's point of view. We collected the ideas with a brainstorm type of thing together on the smartboard. Then we connected the ideas  to six themes and formed six groups who had to plan their video to a storyboard around the theme their group had  - randomly chosen, just to be fair.

Our time was limited when shooting the videos and we had just three cameras, so it had to be made sure that the students knew what they have to do when it's their turn to have the camera. So the planning was important - the groups weren't allowed to start shooting before their storyboard and details had been accepted by one of the teachers. Making the storyboards as a group was a great practice for social skills and for cinematic thinking and media literacy - they now have hands-on-experience on for example what kind of choices there's made when movies are made.

An example of storyboard (http://acomp.stanford.edu/tutorials/storyboarding)

 The children were at least as excited and motivated in video shooting as us teachers and that made our work easy. And if comparing Finnish and American students, they were much more confident in front of the camera compared to how - at least in my experience - Finnish children are usually more shy and are not so into performing.

Here you can see the results of our work during the two lessons (2x90minutes) with the videos. Eeva edited the videos in right order in one night (we thought that the students' computer skills were in the level where editing would have taken too much of our precious time), but otherwise we didn't touch them - we had to respect the directors' views! 

PS. If you wonder what the other students were doing when the others were taking videos - well, they weren't just waiting. We had four secret tasks that every group had to do together one group at a time and keep them as secrets from everyone else until the class was over. The tasks dealt with Finnish comics, cutting and gluing, a little bit of Finnish language and some geographic... But I won't tell more, because they wouldn't be secrets anymore then.