Week #9 - Deadlines

This week was all project, all the time. The students slowly entered panic mode as they realized that their digital story was due on Friday. Most of the students in these classes are pretty responsible, and their desire to create a worthwhile product really kicked in late in the game. I was seeing Windows Movie Maker in my sleep, we were so busy.

It's worth noting that the students interest level increased dramatically when they were engaged in the actual creation process (3.1.3, 3.1.4). As far as the new Bloom's taxonomy is concerned, they're engaging in higher order thinking when synthesizing and creating with information, so we were happy to get them there, but their motivation levels jumped when they were creating too, so much so that I might recommend removing the research aspect of this activity when I try it again in the future. I like the notion of them locating their own resources (1.1.4, 1.1.6) but it requires a lot of time that could be focused by preparing a web portal for them. In fact, it could serve a lot of alternative purposes to create a resource pool, giving you an opportunity to discuss copyright issues and ethical resource usage in digital media (1.3.1, 1.3.3). I can envision expanding this project by contacting a local veteran's organization (VFW, VA Medical Center, etc. for local options) and having students interview the organization members directly. Then, have them draw media from a prepared resource list of copyright safe sources, discussing the proper use of resources in digital media creation. Once the projects are finished, we could contact the LOC Veterans History Project and see about uploading their submissions to the LOC. There's a lot of good possibility in there.

In the end, most of the students created a very worthwhile project, and I'm proud of what they accomplished. We had a lot lot LOT of technology snags, so the importance of flexibility was made annoyingly obvious to me, but on the whole it was a really great experience for us all. And I have survey results to prove it. :)

On an unrelated note, we had an opportunity to test one of the board games we would order with grant money, should we receive any. I was really impressed with how quickly the students took to the strategic aspects of the game and, despite having widely different academic ability levels, they were all playing and competing and engaging the game on a very deep level, in an incredibly short amount of time. They leaped to higher-order problem solving in no time, and as often as not the lower-performing students emerged the victors. It was pretty impressive, and really made me believe that games can serve an excellent academic purpose. I'll definitely try to stock some in my libraries in the future, with careful selection of course.