Video editing

Well, I can't say much about video editing honestly. I have done video editing by myself for an after-school activities class, but I haven't really done this with students. I showed those students how to do it, but we were too busy with the other steps of making a video (writing the treatment, storyboarding, rehearsing, taping) that there was no time for them to do the editing at the end. Perhaps next year when I am teaching in a middle or high school, I will have the opportunity.

I am using videotaping with my third graders right now. I know I've written about it here before, but I didn't really talk about how it is going. My students are so excited about this project! We have discovered little things that students do not know though. I talked with my students about writing out our skit during all our discussions, but I started referring to it as a script. I wrote the character's names on the board for them (waiter, customer) and talked about writing out the person's name for each of their lines, because otherwise it would be impossible to know who was talking when. I thought that my detailed instruction was enough. After working on the scripts for a day, I visited each group and really looked at their scripts. I had 2-3 groups (total, out of 20) who had basically done nothing! I talked with them and realized, they have no idea what a script is! They were unable to put together my details about what they are writing with the word "script". This is such a silly little detail that I would never have thought about, until now. I was actually impressed with myself for planning out a lesson on how to do the script, but I never thought to actually define the word itself.

This just goes to show, we really learn something new every day. On Thursday, I learned to always define new words or phrases that I plan to use often, just in case.