21st Century Ephemera

I despise Animoto’s use as evidence of learning in the classroom. It produces a veneer that implies intent but requires none. It allows people to put on the facade that their students are doing intelligent work. They seem to trick even themselves.

That being said, I finally came up with a use that would require some thought. Pretend Animoto is an author with intent and intelligence. Analyze the choices in image juxtaposition, camera angles etc. Really break it down as if the director had some control and thought behind all the choices. You could do this with random videos from the showcase, have students contribute their own images etc. It’d also be fun to make comparisons between two auto generated versions of the same images. Which film was produced later in the artist’s career? What experiences caused the change in filming techniques.

A simple idea but it does require some thought in a process otherwise devoid of intellect.

I remixed¹ this video for our new specialty center which is focusing on teaching. Once you pass Obama, there’s some decent video covering students working in groups with computers, Promethean boards ², and digital probes. It might be useful to others.

This is an interview with Wiley Hunnicutt who discusses a unit she did on tolerance with 8th graders at Byrd Middle School. This particular version is for a PTA night there having that focuses on 21st century skills and technology integration.

Wiley¹ is an amazing teacher and speaks passionately and intelligently about this unit. I’d be happy to have my children in her class.

Tolerance Unit from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.

Things about this video that I don’t like.

The sound is all jacked up. We had to shoot this in a room with multiple servers running and it was incredibly noisy. I tried dropping it out but the result is pretty tinny and slightly mechanical sounding. Additionally, I learned that if you edit the audio after clipping the video it won’t apply across clips and you’ll have to edit each clip individually. I do not recommend this.

It’s not bad for one camera man (me) shooting from two cameras but it’d be nice to have some B roll to mix in. I didn’t spend as much time as I should have balancing the look of the two cameras either. The levels are not the same and that’s irritating. One of the issues is that any time I do anything to the clips shot on the 5DMKII I have to re-render and that is incredibly annoying and time consuming. That’s one reason I went with black and white. It was easier to get similar looking colors and I figured it was appropriate given the somber subject. I worry that it’s a little melodramatic though.

In the end what I really want is to splice student work, classroom shots from the project and interviews of the teacher and students into a more complete picture of the unit. That’s our next step with these videos. We’ll then put them on the web with student work samples and tag them so they fit in with our 21st century skills modules.