Today I gave the kids storyboard cards–just big 5 x 7 notecards. They are drawing the frames on one side and the script and text on the other.We also watched part of the EVC video showing introductions.

The kids liked the first one about illegal immigration more than the identity one. I tried to show the other EVC video about Recycling, but the buffering was going so slowly that we had to quit.Their homework is to blog an idea for an introduction.The rest of the class period was spent deciding how to film the segments. I had kids going to various departments for materials. One group wanted permission to go to the parking lot and burn something. I deferred that to the assistant principal who deferred to the principal who is not here today. I think they should do that on their own!

Corrine checked out a camera to go film a footprint in the mud. I made her promise to bring it back tomorrow–we are going on our street interview walk on Thursday, so we’ll need all the cameras charged and ready to go.

I filmed the kids’ discussions today with the Flip Camera that Bill let me borrow. It worked really well and was easy and fast to export. The sound wasn’t terrific, so I don’t think it would be good to take the place of our cameras, but I love how fast the transfer was. I now have 10 .avi clips to play with if I ever want to show people how this project works.Other minor problems: fire wire cords–we had the wrong ones; dead batteries–need a safe place to charge all of the cameras; Andrew was on a band field trip and he had one camera; kids couldn’t get to Adobe Elements from their accounts–no big deal, and all fixed. Polly, our computer resource specialist, got us the cord, e-mailed the proper person for the software, and she hooked us up with cool plastic tags so we know which camera is which.

I showed the kids how few days we have left and they kind of freaked–I guess that’s good.

So I just recounted and there are only 8 more class periods. I’m beginning to panic because 2 of those are taken up with End of Course Exams. YIKES!

I made a fairly tight schedule, but it looks like our screening might have to be later, rather than earlier–maybe we can invite parents to our final and have our screening then. . . oh dear.

Tomorrow would be a good day to go get the people on the street interviews, but there is a band field trip–a lot of kids will be on that. . . oh dear.

I’ve got two kids suspended right now. The tech intensive classroom is great for when kids are there, but not terrific for make-up work. I guess there isn’t a documentary film worksheet.

We need a no-rain day on Thursday. I mean it clouds, no rain.I hope the screencasts that I made help the kids understand Adobe Elements.

I just got an e-mail from Edublogs that said that there will be an update that will change the Dashboard–hope it’s not too confusing for the kids.

Let it be a challenge to you. . .

I realized that in my urgency to get this project going, I never posted my own ideas about why I wanted my students to experience this project.

In addition to teaching

• research skills
  • note-taking,
  • summarizing,
  • paraphrasing,
  • picking out important details,
  • finding meaningful passages to quote,
  • citing sources)
• technological skills
  • blogs
  • RSS feeds
  • Google Reader
  • video/sound recording
  • video/sound editing
• writing skills
  • blogs (posts and responses)
  • query letters
  • thank you letters
  • findings essay
• interview skills
  • formulating open questions
  • finding contacts
  • asking follow-up questions
  • pacing of interview

what I am trying to do is show them the correlation between film-making and writing–how the raw film footage is like a rough draft or a free write and now we need to go in and revise and edit (pulling quotations, organizing in a meaningful way. I’m hoping for some carry-over into their writing–transference, that ever-elusive ideal. They seem to understand the purpose of the visual metaphor–maybe they’ll be able to think of a written one to make their prose richer.

Click here to watch a video that shows you how to

• rename still files
• change the orientation of the photo (portrait to landscape)
• change transitions between photos slide show
• delete image from video

Dear Parents,

I hope that you have heard by now that our class is creating a documentary film as a part of our research project.

For our film we will be interviewing “people on the street” to get information everyday people’s perceptions of climate change and global warming. In order to interview people other than teachers and students, we will be taking a walk (with our cameras and microphones) up to a corner near school where there are stores and gas stations. We think we will be able to get a more diverse interview pool that way.

Students will be interviewing in groups of four or five and there will be two adult supervisors. I can’t tell the exact day because that will depend on the weather, but I wanted you to be aware of our class plans.  If you need to contact your child, call the office and they will call me on my cell.

You can import individual still images or you can create slide shows of multiple images. Click here for a quick tutorial on adding still images to your film that you have stored on your computer.

Click here for an introductory video to using Adobe Premiere Elements. We are using this program rather than Movie Maker because this one allows us to have multiple audio tracks. We will want to have narrated voice-overs as well as music going at the same time, and this program allows for that kind of flexibility. Premiere Elements also allows us to do some really cool effects that we’ll get into in later screencasts.

On Wednesday Jacquelyn, Jenny, and Spoorthi went downtown to interview a Channel 4 meteorologist.  They came in Thursday morning bubbling over.  Kent Ehrhardt was gracious enough to grant them an interview and let them use the news set.  He even gave them editing and camera tips–he showed them how to do a fake interview to do a cut away shot.  What a terrific experience.  The kids got a tour of the studio and they even got footage of the weather studio.

In class on Thursday, most of the kids were involved with Special Olympics, so there were only a few kids here.  But Jacquelyn showed us the raw footage of her group’s interview.  We paused the film and discussed

• lighting (it was really good since they were in a studio)
• sound (it was very clear)
• microphone placement
• frame–there was too much headroom at times
• bracing camera with tripod or other solid feature (the image was a little shaky at times)
• decisions about a tight or wide frame–do you want the interviewer in the shot?

We also looked at Andrew’s footage from the Forest Park Earth Day Celebration from last weekend.  He did a great job of getting different kinds of footage (panning shots, close-ups, and interviews).  He didn’t have the release forms, so we can’t use many of the interviews, but some we will be able to use the images without sound because he doesn’t have faces in all the shots.  There is one that shows how to make power out of household items–that could be useful.

Jason also posted some of his footage–many of his images will be terrific for background/voice-over segments.

In class on Thursday we looked at the EVC Student DVD segment on visual metaphors.  It was great to have examples to show the kids.  In class they brainstormed 5 different visual metaphors that they could actually film.   They came up with really interesting ideas that will make for powerful images.

They were also supposed to evaluate which metaphor would be the most effective and why–I need to work on helping them explain their thinking–the reflections and evaluation sections of their blogs are much weaker than their summaries.

Can Climate Change Make Us Sicker? 

Jason shared this Time/CNN article with me–it was really intersting.

In this article, Bryan Walsh writes about the effect of climate change on human health, including

• a rise in malaria caused by the increase in strong downpours
• heat related deaths caused by heat waves in places not used to such temperatures (Europe 2003), especially the elderly
• water borne diseases because the water cycle changes (heavy rainfall)

“For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it’s in our medical interests to reduce it. ‘Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy,’ says Patz”

Check out the Nature editorial that says that slowing global warming would be very difficult because the “technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought”–are we already too late?

“the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation.”

Patz thinks that we have a plan for  the effects is important but even more important would be “cutting off the problem upstream”

On the page of this article, there was a podcast  that was an interview with Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (that’s where Mr. Landow went to school–I wonder if he knows him!), in which he elaborated on some of the ideas in Walsh’s article.  It was also a good example of an expert interview–I think the interviewer may have been Walsh.

Some interesting ideas:

• Important not just adapting, but fighting the causes–

• Greenhouse gases have a 1/2 life of 70-100 years–we will have a warming, so we will need to adapt, but that is not all–if we only focus on that, “we’re mopping up the floor while the faucet is still running”

• Patz talks about the importance of environmental policy merging with energy policies and health policies–they all converge with climate change.

Reflection

This was an informative article and interview.  The fact that the CO2 is not going away for awhile, no matter what we do made me realize that adaptation and preparation for the health and economic concerns is going to be essential.  But that is not enough–I think people may think the fix is the solution–we’ll take our medicine and avoid malaria, but do nothing to stop the cause of the disease (literal and metaphoric).

Today the kids were amazing! They really thought critically about the questions that they were going to ask on the street. Practicing the questions was a good way for them to see which ones fell flat and which ones evoked an interesting (or at least longer) response. I told Mr. Landow that I wished I had a camera running just to capture the conversations.

The other task we had today was to start to figure out who might be a good source for a formal interview. I shared the one lead I heard, but I was pleasantly surprised that they had so many interesting ideas for expert interviews–meteorologists (Chris’s uncle IS a meteorologist–all right!), Botanical Gardens, factory workers, drought specialists–in addition to teachers, scientists and professors–now I just hope we can get someone to let us interview them and that the kids are able to go to interview the person.

Their homework (which I still need to post) is to write a script or letter convincing the expert interview to let them interview him/her. Many of the students just had a general idea for contact and need to follow through with a name and contact information. I wonder if they should use their cell phones and all make calls simultaneously or if having the school phone on Caller ID would be better.One frustration is that some of the kids have not done anything yet–we’ve been working for almost two weeks now and some have absolutely no blogs. They have computers in class, so they should have something, even if they don’t have access at home.