I’m still here and I haven’t forgotten my promise to write up the iMedia units. Unfortunately I was ill for a large chunk of last week and am on half term this week - and left all of my notes at school. Tsk. I’ll have to do some marking now instead.
Incidentally - I had the ‘experience’ of a whole day’s PD day on the new ICT curriculum. The one interesting part of the day was comparing our current Y7 Scheme of Work to the new learning outcomes. And we’re already meeting or exceeding each one.
I had been looking at HoD jobs in the area, but if I have to sit through a number of those days as a result then I wonder if any amount of money can really be worth it…
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the school, working with Creative Partnerships, has arranged for a refugee bus to turn up. It’s a trailer which is used as a stimulus for discussion about the various types of people that come to the country, the labels we give them, the impressions people have of them and the reasons they came here in the first place.
Being in a fairly affluent area we have a lot of ‘Daily Mail’ parents and a lot of low-level intolerance. We have very few problems of overt racial abuse but a lot of people with quiet prejudices bubbling away.
As part of the project I had a Year 8 class blog about what they thought a refugee was, and then again once they had been through the trailer to see how their impressions had changed. It was interesting to see that most of the pupils took to the whole project very well and I think some valuable learning has come out of it. Equally interesting were posts like this one which perhaps demonstrated slightly less in terms of long term improvements to the images people have.
Overall I think it’s been a very worthwhile project and I’ll certainly be looking to expand the range of ‘global’ topics I cover in ICT.
OK, so following up from my training, here is my abridged tutor handbook for Level 2, Unit 1. Expect the other 7 in due course. I’ve included the key notes from what I was given plus notes I made myself during the day. Any inaccuracies are my own fault and if in doubt - check with Alison!!! (more…)
I know I said I was going to write-up comments for each unit over the weekend. Well, it’s still on the list of things to do, it’s just that other things have temporarily taken over.
I’m sat here with a rare 15 minutes spare and I’m contemplating what to do next with my iMedia group. The project brief I gave them, to create an advert for a local business, allows sufficient depth to meet the assessment criteria - a minimum of 3 edits with different tools. So basic cutting, adding titles, transitions and/or video effects ought to be fine. I’m still not sure they’ve got enough theory under their belts though, and I’m not sure they’re all good enough for my liking.
I’m trying to think of an alternative project brief for next time and, inspired by the montage sequence in Team America: World Police I was going to get them to make a trailer for a film. Of course they need to capture the footage for themselves and the more I think about it, the greater the gulf between professional trailers and our low-timescale, low-budget attempts seems.
Another thought was a music video, but I’m not entirely convinced that this will lead to anything other than messing around for a couple of weeks. So what else? An interview? A documentary? An advert for the school? The course? A chosen GCSE subject? Do I give them all the same script? (I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to as that’s not part of the assessment criteria - although storyboarding is).
It needs to be a project that will allow them to film with a minimum of props and other equipment, and in a short space of time. Being able to film people without needing a change of clothing is useful, and the ability to add effects, transitions and edits without it looking too ‘primary school’ is key.
Feel free to offer suggestions. I’ll let you know what we decide…
NB: I’ve added an iMedia category to the blog but have not (as yet) retrospectively tagged previous posts. I won’t make any promises but Multimedia should provide similarly themed posts in the archive.
Yesterday I attended an iMedia training day, mostly aimed at those planning to deliver the course form next year. As we’re halfway through the year with our first cohort we thought it might be sensible to get some training and so we spent some time with the Chief Moderator, Kevin Wells, as well as Alison Pearce, the head honcho.
It was my first formal training course for a specific qualification but I got the impression it was somewhat unusual. We got to ask direct questions to the two most important people, and were given direct responses. It seems that they have gone out of their way to make the course easy to manage without being a pain to assess or adminsiter (administrate?).
Most importantly, it seems that we’re delivering the course more or less right, but I thought some of you might appreciate a brief rundown of the topics covered. As such I’m going to take the unprecendented step of using the ‘more’ tag. If the world as we know ceases to exist, I most humbly apologise.
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