We reviewed the segments today.  How watching 5 five-minute clips could take all 90 minutes of class astounds.  But time, again, has lost logic when it comes to deadlines.

All five  groups did have a somewhat completed segment.  That’s good. The reviews were helpful–just wish we had done them last week.  Problems that were most common included:

• sound variations (need to modulate)
• clips not all the way clipped (sound or visual blips)
• some parts belonging more effectively in other sections
• lack of research incorporated
• difficulty in reading fonts–sans serif works better than serif
• short clips–keeping the pacing even throughout the whole movie (that’s probably not  going to change, but good to remember next year)
• narration not used enough

They were very frustrated that after the critiques there wouldn’t be much time to work on fixing them.  That is not ideal, to say the least.  About 8 kids stayed after to try to make their changes.

Andrew finished the introduction and conclusion.  The class decided on a title–Global Warming:  Cold Facts for a Hot Issue.  Not too shabby

Overall, the kids did a great job.  I’m very impressed with what I saw today and I hope the editing time tonight and tomorrow morning will give them enough time to fix the less successful parts.  This is a great class–they’ve really worked hard.

Now my job is to put the pieces together and make citation slides.  I told them I’d transfer their works cited  pages to the film.  It should be ready to go Thursday for our showing.  It seems like we are going to have quite a few people to watch!  Authentic audiences galore!

For almost 3 hours after school, on a beautiful spring Friday (and might I add that it was the first sun we’ve seen in weeks), there were ten 10th graders up in my room working on last minute edits for their documentary film segments.  And no one complained.

The discussions were about how to pare down the 30 minutes of film down to 5 and how to find music that wasn’t copyright protected.  One group used my old Mac (I’m never giving it up) and used GarageBand to create their own music.  It actually sounds pretty good!

Jill’s group had a discussion about the ethics of cutting out the phrase “if global warming is real” for part of their  segment.  After about 15 minutes of going back and forth, they decided that it would be misrepresenting their interviewee if they edited that part out, so they left it in.  I was proud of them for their conclusion, and of  myself for letting them reach it by themselves.

Jenny’s group had 2 expert interviews and really had to work to cut everything down.  They kept announcing “We’re down to 17 minutes” then “Oh no!  We forgot about Kent–now we’re back up to 37!” and then finally “Five  minutes!” They’ve really had to decide what is important and essential to their argument in order to keep the segment at 5 minutes.  It will be interesting if I can see if any of these skills transfers to their writing.  But who knows. . . it’s so difficult to account for what influences what.

Kelsey’s group finished early–they were doing their narration, so I didn’t see much of them.   They had to find a quiet place downstairs–in my room it was a bit raucous with all of the editing and composing and discussion going on.

The other two groups had put time in earlier in the week.  I assume they are ready to go.

Our preview screening will take place on Monday–and then after that, it’s opening night (or at least opening morning).  Jill made an invitation.  The kids are supposed to post the information so that their local blog readers might attend if they wish.  We already have one  RSVP!  I guess I better clean for company

I just like to create a sense of urgency.

I just read an interesting report about an article in Nature that said there was a global cooling.   The angle was a worry that if there was a cooling happening (caused by natural  changes in ocean currents) over the next 7-8 years, then governments would not feel the urgency to curb greenhouse gases which are causing harm in some ways.

Today our editing went much better–all cords were available, all film got uploaded, no computers froze.  All in all, a successful day.  I’m trying to make sure that everyone is able to edit something and that our computer geniuses are not taking over the entire process.

The blogs are good, but the kids have lost track of what they have to do on a daily basis–perhaps they have written blogs and not published them.  When I gave out grades, many people were surprised by how much was NOT there.  They were supposed to have a total of 11 sources, and many did not have enough.  I’m hoping when they check they’ll be able to find everything.

We need to figure out a title–I think I’ll send an e-mail with a survey link so we can get that decided over the weekend.

I need to make screencasts for editing clips and adding voice-overs.

Please post an idea for an organizing principle for the entire documentary. It will be like a thesis for an essay.

Also post a focus statement for your segment. It will be like a topic sentence for an essay. Make sure you tell what your group is

One thing that the kids didn’t seem to be able to distinguish was the difference between expert and street interviews. They thought that people who said that global warming didn’t exist were “bad interviews” instead of seeing that they could use those responses as a way to show that there needs to be more education.

Perhaps I could tell them about the practice documentary I started to make with EVC when we interviewed people about their most memorable experience with teachers. While our group interviewed people who had positive memories, some of the groups interviewed people whose school experience was horrendous. If I were making a documentary, I would show the power of teachers have to create lasting memories for students, good or bad.

I’ll try on Monday.

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).

This morning when I was driving to work and heard a great NPR story about a college student who was going to all kinds of conferences on global warming. She is a real activist. Then some of the things she was saying made it sound like she was at Wash U and lo and behold she was! When I got to school I looked up the story about this Climate Policy Wonk–she might be a good lead for an expert interview.

Today we had the kids write about what they had learned so far.

• What you’ve learned?
• What’s surprised you?
• What should the focus of your segment be (based on what you know so far)?
• What further research do you need?
• Do you have any research that could help another group? (and what are you going to do about it?)

For the most part, they gave thoughtful responses.

We also talked more about academic discourse and that part of continuing the discussion is to answer the questions and address the comments that the blog-readers pose. They needed direct instruction to open the links that others gave them and to respond to those articles. The blog readers have been unbelievably helpful. They have raised thoughtful questions and have been excited to share resources.

Now interviews. I’m getting a bit nervous. We started standardized testing today and we really need the time to get some interviews lined up. I guess we could use in-house specialists, but I would like the kids to get the experience of getting outsiders to be a part of the process. I want them to make those cold calls and figure out how to explain what they need and what they need to do to get the information they need. It takes a lot of planning. I’m hoping that the environmental studies department at Wash U. will be a good resource. I’m not sure if I should call ahead or not. . . probably not. But. . . I just hope it get finished before finals!

Today, when I met with Bill, Edublogs was down for over 2 hours.  Now it is working great, but it was touch and go all day.  I think Edublogs might have been updating the entire site.  I kept being told to go have a cup of tea by the kind people of Edublogs–kind of funny :-).

Another weird thing–my Google Reader stopped updating my students’ posts and comments.  That’s not good.  I thought that no one was doing any work, but it turns out, I was just not being notified.

But, on the happy side, my students started getting comments on their blogs.  Bill suggested that I have them moderate their comments so they don’t get blog spam–now I just need to make sure they accept the comments.  We talked about the importance of accepting comments that have to do with your discussion, even if they are not in accord with their posts.  Free speech issue?

The kids seemed really excited that people were reading their blogs.  Now that I have all blogs adopted, I think I’ll send out another e-mail asking for just one comment from anyone who wants to be involved.  What a nice way for the community to get involved.

I made a survey for the kids to decide what segment they want to focus on–that will help narrow their research a bit.  But I want to make sure they pass on any sources they find to the other groups.

Next time, I think we need to have them look at the encyclopedia resources that Chris showed us–there should be some interesting websites cross-referenced there.

Documentary Ideas

• Many of the comments that were posted suggested watching Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.  Maybe we should have an after school showing.
• I also liked the comment that we should find out how far teachers drive to North High–that would be an easy survey to make.
• It would be fun to film students figuring out their carbon footprints–maybe people not from our class?