A New Season for the ITRTs

We received the following email, our first for the ITRTs new season…

Good morning!
I'd like to put in a request for Debbie or Matt (or both!) to come in and help with a project for our media arts class that will begin on Sept. 7th. Our class meets at 12:30 to 1:30 every day. We have the Apple cart reserved for that time period, and we'll also probably need some flip cameras and digital cameras as well.

Our team huddled together and met with Leigh Ann Ellis and Melissa Overstreet, the Media Arts teachers and Library Media Specialists at Staunton River High School. Leigh Ann’s vision included her students producing a short iMovie about themselves by the end of the week. After collaborating, we had picked out several applications for the students to use. She wanted her students to be familiar with using the MacBook. A rubric was created and the lesson plan written. Game day was approaching…..

As a hook, Leigh Ann shared her final project with the students. The students approached their first assignment with caution. They had made lists about how others perceive them, how they perceive themselves, and 10 things they couldn’t live without. They took their lists and copied and pasted them into Wordle. Next, they took their wordle and used a Mac application called Grab to create an image. Their second assignment, took them to two photo effects sites. Both Dumpr and Be Funky provided hours of fun while the students added some cool photo effects to their pictures. Others opted to use Photo Booth while selecting a fun background. On day three, they learned to use the scanner with pictures they had drawn. Flip Cameras occupied the fourth day. The students shot the video and downloaded to their flash drives. Their final play involved the students creating an iMovie with their wordle, pictures, and video. All of the student’s individual movies will be recorded as one big movie that will be rolled out next week.

And what did the students think about their projects….here are a few of their comments…
My favorite application was….
Wordle because ist’s something different and pretty cool.
Photo Booth because it’s fun.
Photo Booth because we can do so many cool/weird things with it.
BeFunky because I liked how we could do the different effects.
Dumpr because you could change the picture format and all types of designs.
Photo Booth because lets you use different backgrounds to create and introduce Eagle News.
Be Funky because it made us look awesome.
Be Funky because it made the pictures amazing.
Photo Booth because there is a green-screen backdrop feature that could be used to show game highlights.
Dumpr because it made us look good.
iMovie was easy to use and had fun effects.