Special Reporters for School Daily Announcements

In previous lessons students will have learned how to plan and research a story and then make a storyboard for sequencing their story. In groups of three to five students will have chosen a topic to report on around campus. These included:
• Covering a sports event.
• Showing how a school resource is run such as food service, attendance, discipline or counseling services.
• Reporting on a school event, such as a dance, faire, play, music concert, assembly or new school mural.
• Reporting on a school initiative such as a “pay-it-forward” campaign, no bully zones or homework club.

In this new lesson, they will come to class with sets of video clips shot about their topics. In this lesson we will cover how to enter them into Tool Factory Movie Maker and chop them and clip them, and then stitch them together using the canned transitions in the program.

SHOW IT
As is the standard procedure in our class before the students can go to work at their workstations they congregate around the SmartBoard or large video monitor to see the presentation of the days lesson skills in there entirety. The students will get a handout of the simple storyboard that the teacher has prepared for the sample clips that will be used during the lesson sequence. The teacher will begin with a quick high-level tour of the Tool Factory Movie Maker program: identifying and describing the menus, resource palettes, preview and the timeline editing areas. The teacher will then show them how to attach their Flip-cameras to the computer via the USB port and import their clips into the Tool Factory Movie Maker program. Referring to the storyboard handout, the teacher will demonstrate how to place a clip on the editing timeline and to split it into sub-clips and trim off unwanted sections. Again following the storyboard, the demo will continue to show how to place a second clip in position on the timeline, how to reorder clips and to insert transitions between them.

FOLLOW IT
Students will go back to their individual workstations and from the networked class materials folder get a copy of the materials that the teacher used for his demo: two short movie clips. The teacher will then guide them through the same procedure that he demoed in the first part of the lesson. Students will follow the step-by-step sequence and ask questions as the come up. On completion students will save their work in their networked turn-it-in folder; this movie project file will be used by the teacher to check for understanding and later by students as the next starting point for the next lesson in the sequence. The teacher will circulate between steps to answer individual questions, to help keep students on track and check for understanding.

DO IT
In the final sequence of this lesson, which most likely will continue into the next day, students will meet in their project groups, download their video clips from their cameras and using their storyboards edit and assemble them using the Tool Factory Movie Maker program. The teacher will circulate to answer individual questions, to help keep students on track and check for understanding.