Wednesday, November 5, 2008

pride is the driving force

Over at Meandering, our colleague Mr. Martin writes about launching an exciting vodcasting project with his students. Every day, they're filming, editing, and publishing a new Word of the Day as a class vodcast. Parents can view each day's vodcast (vocabcast?) on the class homeroom website; or they can subscribe as they would to any other podcast. Families can discuss the daily word over the dinner table. Parents, take heed: You may need to set an extra place at the dinner table for any Hollywood agents that come knocking. These kids are budding stars of the Neo Lexica Cinema movement.


The prospect of seeing their work published to the world can be a powerful motivator and point of engagement for students. As Mr. Martin notes in his reflection,

Pride is the driving force of this project. When I first introduced it. . . they were glued from the moment I mentioned they would be published on the web!
That's not to say there aren't challenges, both logistical (sustaining and streamlining the vodcast creation process) and colleagial (helping neighboring teachers find time, motivation, and resources to try the same project with their students). Mr. Martin is already thinking about these issues.

None of these resources are at my fingertips at school so how am I suppose to
share this fantastic process with other teachers?
What suggestions do you have for making "this fantastic process" accessible and practical?

2 comments:

Jim from MN said...

Scott:

I saw a similar program at TIES last December--I believe it may have been at Holdingford Schools? They had a set program, script and template they used to simplify the whole process on a Mac that even included publishing video to their .mac account for school use (by-passing school servers and domains.) I also recall they used the media center to do this.

I believe these cheap, easy-to-use cameras/camcorders that capture video on SD or Flash cards make this process a lot quicker and easier. The BIG issue seems to be in editing and the amount of time required to add all the bells and whistles kids love! The TIES demo I saw was very trim and set at the beginning and end and the kids added the "middle, daily" content.

Carl Anderson said...

You could streamline this process even more using a webcam. There are plenty of services out there that will let you record and publish content with your webcam. Here are just a few you might want to look at:

http://www.seesmic.com/
http://www.eyejot.com/
http://www.ustreamtv.com/
http://www.youtube.com (Quick Capture)