Individual Learning Plan
Keane Richards
MAT EdTech
12-7-15
1. Overview and beginnings
When considering what technology to teach in Naukati School, I started by considering what would be most useful for my students. Whether they decided to continue with higher education or enter the workforce, what would they be able to apply in future settings? One skill that is rapidly becoming a prerequisite to many jobs is skill in marketing, especially with photography and video. I decided to have my students work on a commercial project, while at the same time tailoring my digital story for my EdTech course toward a fictional piece similar to a commercial. My objective was to teach my students about marketing and creating stories, while learning the hard skills of video production. Meanwhile, I would learn the essentials alongside them.
Creating commercials is much more than just putting video together. As this course has taught me, all video projects have a central story – and that story usually revolves around a conflict. I started my unit by analyzing famous commercials and their story lines. Here are some examples:
Budweiser: “Friends are Waiting”
Got Milk? original: “Who Shot Alexander Hamilton?”
Nike: 25th Anniversary
Budweiser: “Lost Dog”
All of these commercials involve a central conflict or idea, in addition to involving other worth aspects (Nike’s catchy “just do it” message; the cute factor of Budweiser’s dog commercials; humor in the Got Milk commercial). The students journaled their thoughts and brainstormed ideas about the factors that made these commercials great.
One aspect we chose to analyze further was humor. Some of the most humorous “commercials” I have seen are from an organization called “Rollin’ Wild.” The eight clips can be seen here. The clips were designed for film festivals and not for marketing, but the idea is the same. After watching the suite of clips (with everybody unable to stop laughing by the 8th clip), the students wrote simple responses in dry erase on three marker boards:
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Is humor important?
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Why do you think that we laugh?
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Are you going to incorporate humor into your commercial?
Students overwhelmingly felt that humor was important and that they would try to incorporate it into their commercials. Afterwards, we discussed why we laugh and investigated different ways to create humor in our commercials.
Students began their commercials with a story chart, and then wrote a story table before any filming began. Here is one example of a student’s story table for a “Mountain Dew” commercial:
Our main limitation for filming was the lack of technology resources. Despite other teachers and the district suggesting that Naukati had a nice digital camera and two smaller ones for student use, I have not found anything. Students filmed with their phones, while I filmed using a cheaper personal digital camera.
2. Filming and Editing
Before the EdTech course, I had not ever done any filming before (despite being married to a wife who has much documentary film experience). Rather than create a simple project for the course, I wanted to practice filming from unique angles and setting up fictional scenes for my “commercial.” One of the most fun scenes to film and set up, expressing a scene of classroom chaos, involved my students. The students hurled paper balls, airplanes, and insults at me (the “new teacher”) while I attempted to point to the classroom norms. In this and other parts of the film, I attempted to use humor to complement the story. Setting up my digital story this way was a lot of work, but I learned much from it.
Having never used iMovie before, editing was a fun challenge for me. Perhaps most fun was integrating several music pieces to give a mood for the piece. In total, I ended up with a four-minute film that, though not perfect, I was happy with.
Unfortunately, my students postponed on filming until the last minute and I was not able to critique their shots before they assembled their finished commercials (which, as of this writing, I have not yet seen). In our next video project, I plan on focusing at least a full week on the filming process, including such things as shot angles and the unique impressions angles can give.
3. Reflection on the process
I enjoy learning alongside my students. Working on a digital story, film methods, and editing techniques gave me ideas and focus for my commercial unit. However, it certainly was not perfect. While the students were presented with (in my opinion) many good ideas, I did not do a good enough job setting deadlines for various steps, meaning that many of the students did most of the work at the last minute (probably seriously reducing the quality of their films). In the future, I would set a rigid timeline with set due dates for various parts of the project. In addition, I would spend time focusing on film and editing techniques so that students could piece together smaller parts of their stories over time.
I am certainly not done learning about film. Hopefully, I will be successful writing a grant for entry-level DSLR cameras for Naukati School this spring, allowing me to teach a film / photography course next year. In that class, I can focus on more advanced techniques that benefit both my education as well as my students’.