I am so excited to be presenting at the K12 Online Conference this year. When the call went out for proposals, I suggested putting one together with Anna Baralt. We were selected and will be presenting Monsters Bloom in Our Wiki in the Kicking It Up a Notch strand. It is a look at a project we did in the 2007-2008 school year.Today the teaser was put up on the K12 Online page. I created it using iMovie 08 with images drawn by our students for the project last year. I found a wonderful piece of music, Core Meltdown, by George Wood over on podsafeaudio.com.
I used the music in a family vacation video. I quickly realized how powerful combining photos and music can be. It becomes even more so if you carefully match the image changes to the beats of the music. Those lessons learned on the family video really helped as I created the K12 teaser.
Ann
ReplyDeleteI saw your video and am intrigued to learn more about how you set it all up. I do a Monster Exchange project, too, with sixth graders but would love to move it online. I am struggling with the right platform.
Kevin
We're going to go through the project from start to finish. I really liked the way we used the wiki to share the monsters and descriptions. A monster exchange is a great way to have the students analyze their work and compare it to others. I think you'll come away with some new ideas for your exchange.
ReplyDeleteI would also be interested in this project. I teach K-8 and would like to do it with 3-5. Any suggestions on getting this started?
ReplyDeleteThe best way to get started is by working with your students on examining how things are described in books. In the second grade, we used Go Away, Big Green Monster by Ed Emberely and Hairy Scary Ordinary, What is an Adjective? by Brian Cleary. You can make charts in Kidspiration to classify the different adjectives. This is really important as they have to draw and then describe their own monsters.
ReplyDeleteThe presentation is going to walk through the steps we have taken with our classes and some things we want to include this coming year.
Are you doing it within your own school? That is the way we both started. It makes the project a little easier to manage the first time. Take a look at my posts tagged "monster exchange" to see my initial reflections on the project. I think the K12 video will give you a lot of resources to try this project whether within your own school or between two or more schools.