Splicing Video into the Writing Process

This article is called "Splicing Video Into The Writing Process" and is written by Tammy Pandina Scot and Diane Harding.

This article truly just adds some spice to the classroom and switches it up a bit. At an elementary school in Charlottesville, Virginia the fifth graders are studying the U.S. Civil war and using the writing process and exploring the use of digital videos, they marry that technology to be a fun project. Digital videos are used as a tool to teach the students in a different way instead of just a presentation in front of the class. Our teachers growing up teach us writing and speaking but now we must also communicate with pictures, audio, and text. This project uses technology as a tool that will help students become literate in multimedia in the digital age. Students will plan the project, write the script, film the scenes on their own and edit there movie in the end on their computer at school or at home. There need to be a set of rules that are set that tell the students what facts to cover and once they are assigned the group and subject to make the movie on then they are told to present to the class how they are going to go about it. They will then write a hardcopy of the script and bring that in when the final is turned in. Either each group can do their own video or the entire class can be part of one final large video that everyone worked on together.

My future students will use technology as part of their learning process because it will be more prevalent when I am teaching in the next couple years and it is important and fun to incorporate it into an everyday lesson. It sounds to me like the children in the class loved this project because it gave them a chance to work together and do something fun and unique instead of the usual. I would love to do this with my students because it is so much fun filming each other and you can go back and fix things. Everyone plays a major part in the project so you feel needed the entire time. The outcome that the teachers received was very positive and they felt grateful that their students are more engaged and enthused for learning due to them incorporating this unique project. When I do this in my classroom I am going to for sure do it as a class so we can make one movie together and then we can all get a copy and keep them for moment a. It will be a very fun activity.