The Earth Day project has gotten a second wind. We are now endeavouring to get it ready to be entered in the SD36 district student film festival -- called Montage. The team is very excited about having their work on view this way. We're doing a bit of an Oscar-style dinner for them before hand and then we'll meet up with their families at the event.
The challenges of completing this project have been many, but 2 stand out for me right now: (1) a serious bandwidth problem which means that getting into Vuvox has ranged from impossible to OK depending on the hour of the day and the day of the week. Sometimes we can get into the site and access our collage, but key functions seem to have been stripped away so we can look but can't save. (2) our district has very strict policies regarding software acquisition (whether purchased or downloaded). As a result, some work gets done by the kids at school, and some things have to be done by me at home (where the download policy is more liberal!).
Because Vuvox collages cannot be downloaded, we have had to devise a way to get a better final version than the video we did for the Earthcast. We decided to try a screen capture & I chose Snagit [http://www.techsmith.com/] for the job because they have great support (they actually email back within 24 hours!!!) and they provide a fully functional, 30 day trial with no watermark -- rare in the world of 'free trials'. Snagit is now my new favourite new tool, because it worked beautifully and gave me 'snags' I can use both on my home PC and on the Mac we're using to assemble the final version. Snagit is not approved for use in SD36 schools that I am aware of -- so the capture work has to be done by me.
When I work on my own at home, without a connection to the intuitive way the kids have of finding the strengths of the software, I'm left learning by trial and error (mostly error it seemed this weekend!). In the past, I have tended to think of computers as very isolating for kids -- envisioning them beind closed bedroom doors gaming away until all hours of the night, but this project has had the opposite effect. It has become the focal point for the kind of teamwork and collaboration that many classroom educators -- well 'prod'd' in the ways of cooperative learning -- can only dream of.
As well, there has been not one instance of negative criticism from other students -- only offers of help when challenges have arisen and lots of curiosity and positive feedback when they've previewed the work. That kind of result keeps me going when the 2 challenges I noted above really should have sunk the whole project weeks ago. I am already thinking about how I can organize a small multimedia group for ongoing project development next year. This thing crosses classes, social groups, grade levels -- and gets the kids and staff (all the way up to the assistant-superintendent level) interested enough in the possibilities that they come together and stick by each other and the project until it's completed. With the kinds of kids we have in our centre -- that's an unsual and wonderful outcome.
Are you aware that Friday is Pangea Day? [http://www.pangeaday.org/]
More soon,
Sue