Last week, the grade 5 students welcomed visitors to experience their Exhibition entitled “Time to Make a Difference: Sharing and Shaping Our Planet’s FutureĀ”. Parents, students, and teachers from throughout the school community and other schools came to view the grade 5 exploration of the PYP transdisciplinary theme called Sharing the Planet.
Grade 5 students guided visitors through the Exhibition and discussed with them the rights and responsibilities we have when it comes to sharing the finite resources on our planet. Our visitors viewed and interacted with a variety of displays and models that illustrated the interconnectivity of the natural environment and the impact of human use on the natural environment. By the end of the Exhibition, visitors saw how grade 5 students made a difference to the world through their actions. To highlight just a few, visitors learned about Global Citizen Videos, Saving the Dolphins, Earth Power Anthology, Saving Bears, and Recuperating the Natural Environment. Grade 5 students also performed a play, complete with music, dance, and drama, to emphasize the power we have to make a difference to the world. Congratulations to our grade 5 students!
Here’s a video about leveraging Web2.0 to share ideas. It highlights the benefits and drawbacks of this power today. I often point out to my students to “share their story” - for the same reasons given in this video.
I found this video in John Pederson’s post Must View Video in my NetNewsWire reader.
Next week, this video will welcome visitors to our grade 5 Exhibition. In three minutes, this video will introduce our Exhibition story with images, narration, and music. People will learn about the central idea that we explored, the inquiries that it generated, and the action they led us to take.
How did I make it?
Photos
Teaching and learning captured with my Canon PowerShot S80 that I keep strapped to my belt.
Animoto
69 photos converted into a fast-paced movie with Animoto magic. By the way, Animoto is offering “Classroom Codes” for free full-length videos. Get the details from the Animoto Education Program. At this point I had the images for my movie but no music, an essential piece.
GarageBand
Narration and music created in GarageBand. Inside the Create a New Podcast Episode, we recorded our narration and added a jingle. I then exported it as an MP3 file and uploaded that file to my Animoto project. Animoto synched the MP3 file with the photos and created the video that you see here but without the text and titles.
iMovie
Text and titles created by iMovie. By now my story is almost complete with images, voice, and music. But it’s still missing words. I needed to highlight some key ideas in the story with written words to pull it all together. For this job, I turned to iMovie. I simply downloaded my Animoto movie (a feature only available with an All-Access Pass) and imported it to iMovie. Inside iMovie, I added title slides on top of the slides where the narration was sharing a key point. I used the title slides to reiterate in writing what the narrator was saying. In the end, I also added a scrolling credits slide with all the student names. I then exported the movie using these Export Using QuickTime settings.
This was our first experiment using Animoto, GarageBand, and iMovie to tell a story. I am eager to see what else we can do with Animoto and friends. Anybody else have any teaching ideas that took off with Animoto?
Filmed with my Canon PowerShot S80 mixed on my MacBook with, GarageBand produced on PC with MovieMaker, this three-minute video highlights the problem of plastic bags in our environments and proposes reusable bags as a sustainable alternative to plastic bags.
We’re working to make a real difference with this video project, so we shared the video on the local expat social network, tianjinexpats.net. I discussed the educational benefits of this video project on U Tech Tips. I sent it around to all my Facebook friends who live in Tianjin. And I posted it on our IST Exhibition channel on YouTube as well as the PYP Exhibition Ning.
Now I can blog from Facebook using SixApart's BlogIt application. They say,
With Blog It, you can post and share your content across multiple platforms with only one click! Whether you blog using TypePad, Vox, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com or WordPress.org, or micro-blog using Twitter, Pownce or your Facebook status, now you can update everything via one easy-to-create post on Facebook. Plus, when you post using Blog It, you can ensure all your friends and contacts know about your post regardless of where they follow you on the web.
BlogIt's interface is too basic - no image upload, wysiwyg, or comment administration - but this feature automates sharing my blog posts with my friends on Facebook, so it's worth a try.
