Mar
24
Written by:
Instructional Technology
3/24/2009 12:56 PM
Littleton Public Schools are subscribers to the Discovery Network of Educational Videos, and our teachers and students make great use of the high quality, student-friendly resources. Teachers tell us that they find the video and audio library robust, and the content is easy to integrate into their lesson plans. Increasingly, teachers are asking the students themselves to browse the Discovery Library to find multi-media resources for research units. Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of fourth grade teachers at Lenski Elementary.
Littleton Public Schools are subscribers to the Discovery Network of Educational Videos, and our teachers and students make great use of the high quality, student-friendly resources. Teachers tell us that they find the video and audio library robust, and the content is easy to integrate into their lesson plans. Increasingly, teachers are asking the students themselves to browse the Discovery Library to find multi-media resources for research units. Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of fourth grade teachers at Lenski Elementary. There, some of the teachers are asking their students to take the Discovery video clips, edit them in Windows Movie Maker, and add their own narration. It’s this last piece that I like so much. At Lenski, the challenge was for the students to craft a narration that had more information, more research than the original narrator’s. To complete this part of the assignment, students:
Took notes from the original video clip,
Conducted research with the help of the Librarians and Media Center staff,
Wrote a script that was approved by the teacher,
Used podcasting software to narrate their new, improved script,
And dropped the podcast (as an .mp3 file) into Movie Maker.
The results are brilliant. I had two students (did I mention that they are fourth graders?) share with me the intricacies of splicing multi-track audio files into a single .mp3 to work with Movie Maker. I think that when I was in fourth grade I made a poster board with, maybe, multiple colors. Great work Lenski Staff; your students are reading critically, researching with purpose, writing for an audience, and demonstrating their learning in creative, engaging ways. Sample video here.
1 comment(s) so far...
Re: When Discovery Education Videos just aren't good enough...
What a great idea to have students critically look at media rather than simply consume it.... remixing with a purpose. That's the kind of remixing we need our students to be able to do in order to produce meaningful things. Kudos, fourth grade teachers!
By Steve Ransom on
4/13/2009 10:34 AM
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