Sharing Our School

Teacher preparation in advance: We have another French class of 8th graders who skype with us each month. We are in the Cleveland Ohio area and our partner school is in San Francisco California. In advance, both teachers agree to the lesson plan and have our students prepare the movie. When both classes are ready, we plan a date to share them via skype.

1. In groups of 2, students in 8th grade French class discuss and map out a plan of what areas of the school building they will film, who they will interview, and what they will say in French. They may use an online translator if they need more vocabulary to express their thoughts.
2. Students then take the flip cameras out into the building to film and narrate in French their designated areas of the school building and people to interview.
3. Students return to the classroom and then download their raw footage onto a laptop.
4. Working collaboratively, the partners edit their clips, and create their movie using fiip software on the laptop. The teacher assists with groups who need more instruction on how to edit flip movies.
5. As an entire class, the students then merge all their movies into one master movie of our school. Titles, credits, and music are added. They create a master DVD of the school.
6. The teacher then contacts our partner school and we set up a date to share our school video using laptops and skype.
7. On our skype day, each pair of students sits at the teacher's desk. The teacher's laptop is set up and the teacher has contacted via skype the sister school. The laptop is connected to a digital projector which projects the image from the laptop onto the screen so that the entire class can see what is on the laptop. External speakers are also connected so that the entire class can hear what is being said. Each pair of students speaks in French to their sister school. They describe the part of the school building that they filmed. Then the teacher enables the "share screen" feature on skype and the students can see half the screen of the live students and the other half the screen of the video. My students then see the California video when ours is finished. We can pause the video, and ask questions in French about our schools. Each pair of students has the opportunity to be seen live using skype and to answer and ask questions about our school.
8. During the "live" sharing, the teacher takes another flip video of the entire experience.