This is the video I made in week 2. Last year my friend Sam and I spent 5 months travelling and volunteering in Central America. In the last year our lives have changed a lot, I have been busy with the M.Teach and she is now married and pregnant with her first child. Rather than just making the video to fulfil requirements of the class, I thought I would make her a video of our adventure together.

To begin with I was unsure how useful this sort of task would be to use in my classroom. I wasted a lot of time trying to work out how to use the program which made me think that using iMovie with my students would take a lot of time away from learning about History/Psychology/whatever I was teaching. However, the more I played around with the program the easier it became. I think if I played around with it a bit more, I would feel confident enough to help students use it.

Last week I was planning a unit for my year 7 class on Ancient China. I am going to get them to draw a comic strip of a Chinese myth. This alone is an engaging task and I think they will really enjoy it, but it could be made even better if they turned it into a short film. Using a Dragonball Z-esque style of zooming in on cartoon stills, they could create mood, as well as including sound effects and titles to enhance the story. The films could then be used the following year as a teaching resource.

I am doing my placement at Mansfield Secondary College. There are computer labs the students can use, but I haven't checked whether they have Movie Maker or iMovie available for students to use. If I am unable to get the whole class into a computer lab to turn their comics into films, I could offer creatively minded students the opportunity to meet me at lunchtime or after school to learn how to use the software. Being a small country school, they don't get as many opportunities as larger urban schools and the school has a problem with some students becoming disengaged with education. I think a project like this would be a good way to engage students who get bored with traditional chalk n' talk.