Every day, my team begins our daily meeting by entering homework into the team calendar on our school website. It's a nice way to communicate to parents, and also serves as a way to hold kids accountable when they are absent. Understandably so, it's not the most popular page on the website. Based on a quick poll in class, I'd guess less than a third of our kids frequent it more than once a week.
I'm trying to change that. For the past week, I've been taking the last 10 minutes of my silent reading group and filming skits with them that go along with the day's homework. It's giving me practice with my new Flip camera (yesterday's post explained how I got it), and since I upload the finished movie directly into the calendar, I'm assuming more kids are visiting it from home.
Right now the skits are more about the message than the process. I'm the one who writes up the dialogue, and the one who records and edits the video. But I'm hoping by modeling this process on a daily basis, students will soon be able to take over the task. Actually, that's already happening. Today, several students knocked on my door to ask if they could borrow the Flip for a Social Studies project.
Those kids probably aren't going to check the homework tonight, but I can guarantee they wouldn't have thought of adding a technology piece to their project if they hadn't seen how it was done first.
Here are our video skits for the last two days. I hope you enjoy!
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Those are great, John! Your students are fantastic at memorizing and delivery and you've given me some ideas for my flip as well.
@LeeAnn There's nothing worse than watching a video where kids are standing stationary, reading from scripts! One of the techniques I've been trying to demonstrate is creatively hiding scripts so it's easy for students to read, but not obvious to the camera. It seems to have worked - none of the kids in the two videos I posted had memorized their lines! Thanks for the compliment!
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