iVideo

iVideo assignment description:
You will work in small groups or as individuals to develop an i-Video – an elegant, concise, powerful video that inspires the viewer to consider an important educational idea. We’re going to provide the technology and basic skills training, but you’re going to further develop your technology skills through what can best be defined as “learning by doing.” You will share drafts of your videos so that you can critique and revise each other’s work

Director’s commentary:

When I first thought about doing this project, I wanted to do something that was content related. My other two projects that were created for Year 3 were content related so I wanted to keep the trend going. However, as I discussed the project with others in the class, particularly Grace, I realized that she and I had the same feeling about a particular subject. We both had felt that teachers just use technology as a way to fill and pass the time. As we talked and discussed, she had the idea or analogy that compared teaching to a garden. Technology was just a piece of the garden and that you needed a lot more other stuff to make the garden successful. We both then decided that we were going to tackle this project around the analogy of the garden.

During class, we were asked to simplify our project down to one word. As we worked through this process, the word that emerged, and the word that we eventually created our project around, was motivation. We had realized that teachers come to the classroom with so much extra baggage and pressure such as parents, students, behavioral issues, administration and own personal family time  that they have the tendency to create lower quality lesson plans. In a sense, we wanted to create a video that would reignite the teachers’ passion for education.

As you can see through the video, each student took a piece of the sentence. This was done to create a team spirit. Without one person, the sentence would not have been read properly. We also had decided that the ways we would motivate people were through giving each other feedback, remembering why you are doing the job you’re doing, that failure is OK, and enthusiasm for your job. If we could motivate teachers, then we felt like the students could be motivated as well. At the end of the video, you can see that 8 different teachers formed a triangle with their hands on each others shoulder. Again, this was to create a team spirit and feeling.

In terms of technology, we had an awful mess recording. There were three different occasions that we had forgotten to turn the microphone on. So, we had to reshoot the footage at least 3 times which became very frustrating. We had also lost all our footage once. This was my fault. I had clicked and dragged all my footage from SD card into iMovie. I had figured that iMovie creates a duplicate file of everything brought into it. However, when I cleared my trash, all the videos on the screen appeared with question marks. Again, we had to reshoot the footage, which took another hour. We were able to reshoot much quicker because we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve.

If I were to do the video again, I think I would have been planned much better. I would have broken my script lines down into specific people. This would have created a more efficient video shooting process. I would have also been more consistent with lighting and distance to the people’s faces. Overall, it was a really good project and I had a really awesome partner who stayed positive the entire time. We never gave up throughout the process and the class rallied together to make sure that we finished up on time.