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.