The last day of school was yesterday and as usual I have trouble winding down. I’m not sure how I’m always the last to leave the building, but I was for about the 15th year running. I’ve never made it to Jim and Julie’s end of the year party. Alas.

The screening was fun. The kids were very excited to have visitors (whom they almost stampeded when I told them there were doughnuts in the back of the room). Brandon’s mom and Jaquelyn’s grandmother came, along with Kathy and Becky who had been blog readers. Andy, Cindy and Cori also came–that’s a pretty good turnout!

I was really pleased with the finals. The students had to review the film as a whole and discuss whether or not it served the purpose that they had established early on

1. to inform
2. to persuade
3. to effect change

And then tell what worked and what didn’t in the film. They were very insightful and were not delusional about what worked and what didn’t. They caught the sound problems and the choppy editing and the way it didn’t exactly flow together segment to segment. But they also recognized that they did a good job editing the interviews down to the essential and that their visual metaphors made the film more interesting. I was so proud! And if that weren’t enough–their last blog entries talked about what they learned. I couldn’t have hoped for more understanding of what they were supposed to have learned from this project.

I did exit interviews of the kids and filmed it–it’s fun to hear them talk in their own words about their experience. I will be putting the whole thing together–my own meta-documentary.

The other part of the kids’ final was to comment on a blog from VCS–Ms. Cassenelli’s computer class–most of them did. It was a good match for them because the students were focusing on social change–it looked like they were creating their own multi-media information blog about a topic about which they wanted to effect change. Love it when things serendipitously fit together.

The only thing that wasn’t ideal is that cocomment does not work on their blog–it looks like perhaps it is a closed blog? Not sure. But cocomment now works on mine now, so I’m happy.

Feeling pleased with my new theme, I started responding to people who had commented and realized that I couldn’t tag my comments.  I checked around and I still had the little box on other themes, but not on this one.

I wonder if there is some way to make it appear magically (or some other way) so that people who are tracking the comments through the 31 Day Challenge are able to do so.

The kids are in the final stages of editing. One technical question that we didn’t quite figure out was if in Adobe Premiere Elements you can use the audio from a video clip while putting another image over it–a cutaway. I’m sure there is software that allows you to rip out the .mp3 file (0r however it is saved) from the video file, but I was hoping there was an easy way to do it. I’ll need to continue to research (and if by chance anyone runs across this blog and knows the answer, I’d take help, too!)