Strategies for the week

Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers:
I am always looking for new tools for my health class and my broadcast/film making class, and this chapter gave me a few resources I did not know about such as BrainPop, A9 from Amazon, and Creative Commons.  I enjoyed reading this chapter, especially the bit on multimedia.  This year, we have access to YouTube in our school, so finding pieces and videos that fit well with curriculum are so much easier. I think having the ability to add video snippets or demonstration software can amp up the effects of the lesson and help students relate to the subject matter as well as be more engaged in the subject matter.  For example, I am working with the religion teacher to teach the Corporal Works of Mercy to the 7th grade students.  In the past, she presented (verbally) what they were and gave kids a reflection sheet to fill out when they completed a Corporal Work (which then requires the parent signature to testify that the child completed the Corporal Work).  She has found over the past few years that students do not fully understand the concept of Corporal Works, and parents many times are signing the sheets when the student did not do anything with the Corporal Works.  This year, I prepared a wiki that included a recent video with recent music that demonstrated all seven works in three minutes.  I then posted questions for students to answer in groups in a Google apps document.  One of the questions asks kids to research/name/list ways in which they can prove they completed a Corporal Work.  Kids are getting excited about the projects they can do to prove they completed the work, and I think it's because of the way the lesson was presented.  I truly believe if you want to get the kids on board, you need to throw in multimedia presentations within what you normally do, and it makes it seem like a whole different lesson than before (snore and bore now becomes engagement and excitement).

As I was reading about non-linguistic representation, I began to wonder if the screenwriting and story-boarding my Intro to Broadcast/Film-making class would be an example.  Fast forward a few pages, and "Movies and Video" is explained.  I am a newbie at teaching this class, and my experience includes approximately 100 hours of reading and studying books on the subject this summer.  Seeing it in this chapter was a nice reinforcement that video and movie projects should and could extend beyond a "broadcast" or "film" type of class.  I am finding many different resources for movie-making including www.scriptbuddy.com which allows kids to take their prose ideas and put them into a screen-write format.  I have moved on to finding free software that does the same for story-boarding, so if anyone has any ideas. . .
The best resource I have read on film-making in the classroom is titled, "The Director in the Classroom: How Filmmaking Inspires Learning" by Nikos Theodosakis.  I have been using this book as a bible so to speak and contacted the author for more information.  Long story short, Mr. Theodosakis and I are planning a video-conference type of workshop for up to 30 teachers (to be held in the Appleton area).  He covers all grades (K- College). 

I am not a lecture/note-taking type of teacher, so this chapter wasn't very useful to me.  It may be the scope of what I teach (PE, Health, Film-making) is too active for kids to sit and do this.  I am also not a big fan, though I'm sure some teachers find the necessity of it.