Tech Culture

This year I get to teach an amazing class called Technology as a Culture, or Tech Culture for short.  I'm super pumped about this for several reasons.  First, it's a class solely focused on how our culture is centered around technology--how cool is that?  And secondly, the big culminating project for the year is that the students are going to make a video to be entered in Cooperating School District's Show-Me a Movie Contest.  I'm super pumped about this because I'm always so blown away by what students can create when given a little creativity and iMovie.  Stand by for more updates throughout the semester with this project.

The first project we did this year in Tech was kind of a culmination of learning different Internet-based programs and applications on the computer to get the kids familiar with the different programs/applications we are going to be using this year.  The first thing the students had to do was a Google image search challenge.  They had to do a scavenger hunt-type activity using Google images to try and find these 15 images and make sure they met all of the requirements (see sheet below).

Once students found their 15 images, they then selected 8 to focus their short movie around.  Students then took their 8 images and created a storyboard that was going to detail the 8 scenes of their story.  They could create a completely outrageous fictional story, or a believable one--the only requirement was that they had to use only the 8 images they selected.

After their storyboards were complete, students set out to create their iMovie (after watching this great iMovie '11 Basics video and with some iMovie instruction and how-to from Mrs. Mooney :).  Their movies had to follow these simple guidelines:

Once again, I was amazed at what only 2 days and a limited amount of iMovie experience these kids came up with!  We spent a day in class watching the short movies (see below for some of the movies) and critiquing them using post-it notes (one post-it note per video with two comments on it: something you liked, and something that could have been improved upon).  All in all this turned out to be a great starter project and I look forward to bigger projects and more detailed videos these tech students are going to come up with!  Stay tuned!