Post 4: Our Students at Their Best
I thought that I would use the last post in this series to show off what student can accomplish inside of a digital classroom. The students who created this work were comfortable enough in the classroom to be creative and take a risk in creating something different.
I can’t claim the first example, as it was something that I saw online last year that was highlighted by a few of the education blogs I was reading regularly.
This student created a remake of Othello using WoW machinima, and it is great! This shows a level of engagement with the work that most students don’t show with typical writing assignments. Yet his interesting take on the play, through a multimodal format, exhibited creativity, originality, and some dedication to the work, as it had to have taken some time to record and prepare the scenes, record the voice-over, and edit it all together into a finished product. That’s the sort of of engagement that a digital classroom should create.
In my high school Film Class, I had students go above and beyond what was required from them in a film editing project. These two projects are from students who were at opposite ends of the grade spectrum, yet each group produced something original and of very high quality.
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I had a lot of fun watching my students experiment with some new technologies, and I think they enjoyed the process of creation as well. Both showed something different in their videos, using different editing techniques and styles. Yet they both had the same assignment, which was just to create a narrative using editing techniques. Their only tools were a digital still camera and Windows MovieMaker.
But that was last year. How have my students this year worked through their technology questions? For the photo essay, I gave them a range of possibilities for how to complete the project, ranging from very basic photo blogs, to photo slideshows, to video projects, and I had the full range of assignments turned in. I’ve decided to show a couple of them as examples of slide shows and videos.
Kacey used his own musical skills and his Mac laptop to try something new with his slideshow. He uploaded the finished product to Youtube, and its something very cool and original…and definitely very Kacey.
Brinley’s slide show was interesting in that she used a website I wasn’t familiar with to create her product. I gave my students a few sites to check out, like Flickr, Google Presentation, and Zoho Show, but Brinley (and a few other students who also used this site) found an option that worked well for her.
I’m looking forward to collecting some more interesting student work over the next year and a half in 103. Should be a lot of fun!
