I Should Be Marking

So Friday was the end of term – yay! Lots of excitement and we all got to go home for the holidays. What could be better? And I spent most of Friday night FINALLY finishing the editing of the school play (well, the first half – the rest of the footage is on a hard drive at school) and most of Saturday getting started on my next big project.

I’ve been into video editing for a long time on a very casual basis and have now been teaching it for two years as part of iMedia. A colleague of mine elsewhere gave me the idea of training up kids to film and edit school productions themselves and the PE department came to see me about starting a Sports Journalism course involving (amongst other things) filming and commenting on sports matches.

When I mentioned this to the media tech he mentioned that he had been offered some second hand TV studio equipment and the HoD is keen to get something in place so that when we get the inevitable recommendation from some know-it-all with the Local Authority we can smugly wave our hands in the general direction of our mobile studio.

So, I’ve made some logos, planned some shows, started identifying suitable candidates to work on the technical side of things (drama should be able to dig up the on-screen talent) and created the YouTube channel in readiness.

You can’t beat the Christmas holidays!

It’s an ambitious plan but there are several staff interested in it and I’ve mentioned it publicly in a few places (which always helps my own momentum) so I’ll let you know how it goes!

Oh – any recommendations for distribution? I’m thinking Wordpress/Podpress/RSS in a Podcast style but am open to suggestions and advice.

I’m preparing some resources for a Scratch Scheme of Work for Year 7. The one I made last year was OK, but a bit uninspiring and I’d like to be able to have non-specialists walking through it without too much hassle.

I’ve been a bit brave and gone for a narrated video tutorial. I’m not 100% certain that this is the best way but I’m sure the students get sick of PDFs, handouts and chalk & talk so here goes.

My questions (and of course there are always some) are:

• Will the inclusion of me in the video stream a) add some more visual cues/realism or b) cause much giggling distraction and general silliness?
• Is a video introduction suitable for a 3 minute video to show on a whiteboard for situations where headphones aren’t available?
• Should I go back to one of my other methods?
• Is my haircut better than it was on the last video I shoved up here?

Addendum: I know I forgot to put a title on the page, so you don’t need to tell me that

Non-ICT related today.

P4C (or Community of Enquiry) is a way of getting kids to think and discuss issues in an organised way. They sit in a circle, you provide a stimulus and they come up with a philosophical (or simply ‘big’) question to discuss. There is (of course) a lot more to it than that and having run 3 or 4 P4C lessons over the last 2 years I have enjoyed the experience.

So, in my citizenship lesson next week (which is being observed, yay!), I’m running a P4C lesson for my Y10 form class on the topic of conflict. I have 3 images I am considering as a stimulus – the key to which is choosing something that will lead to a GOOD question (my use of a train decorated beautifully with graffiti led to a rousing endorsement of street art – but no discussion at all) and without pushing my opinions onto the students. So here are my 3 candidates:

• Option 1
  
• Option 2
  
• Option 3
  

Option 1 is probably too humorous, but something about it appeals to me. Option 2 is quite shocking (good) but may lead straight to ‘war is bad’, which is not a productive discussion. Option 3 has a lot of relevance as it affects British civillians but there are so many possibilities I’ll end up disappointed at all the ones they’ll miss.
Any thoughts or opinions? I’ll let you know how it goes…

I’ve been using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 recently to put some videos together and thought it was about time to start authoring DVDs with chapters. It seems you can’t import Premiere projects into iDVD with chapter markers and nor can you set specific chapter markers in iDVD (just equally timed markers).

Instead I tried importing the Permiere project into Encore which DOES accept chapter markers but Encore appears to be the single most bug ridden Mac application ever. And multiple Google searches seemed to support this theory.

So ultimately I made the inefficient but effective decision of exporting the Premiere project, importing it into iMovie (thereby doubling the amount of storage space needed), adding chapter markers and then sharing with iDVD.

Ho-hum.