Vidcast- March 1

Post- Production:

I created a vidcast with Rebbecca Moreno about Shakespeare as an introduction to starting one of his plays. We created a photostory to create a more professional presentation of the information we were giving. In studying Shakespeare the class will cover many parts of the core curriculum, most strongly in Standard 1, objectives 2 and 3. We will be analyzing his words used in his plays, the format in which he presents those words and what it all means to us today. In studying the historically relevant works of Shakespeare we can bring in modern ideas and words that come from his work over his lifetime. Everyone is able to find meaning in Shakespeare's works that relates back to them in their lives, I hope that through this small introduction we can help students to slowly find their own connections after further study. We wanted to choose a topic that we would actually use later on in our teaching careers. Shakespeare is a safe bet for a subject covered in a Language Arts Classroom. In creating something so modern to teach about someone that seems so gone in the everyday lives of students we can use technology as a tool to showing that Shakespeare does in fact live on today. In making it as short as we did we will be more likely to keep students' attention than if we had created a twenty minute presentation for the same topic. Along those lines though, we do lose a lot of information in cutting the vidcast so short. Shakespeare deserves much more than under two minutes of our time, so it would be our responsibility to treat this only as a short introduction, not necessarily as a learning tool. I hope to create more vidcasts for my classroom to utilize in the coming years, as I see it as something that students can benefit from seeing and creating themselves. It would be interesting to have students create something like this for one of their assignments. If this had been slightly less formal I think it would lend itself to allowing students to show more of their personality through their work, while still meeting the criteria.

Pre-Production

In creating this vidcast I felt that we learned a lot about all the different tools that are available to us as teachers. There are so many options that we can use in many productive and effective ways to teach our students and to benefit all different types of learners. While there are any ways that we could have taken this assignment, we have decided on an introduction to content in which I believe we will be using a photostory. The other devices taught to us in class also seemed like they could find a place in my classroom. By having so many different tools being used and available to us, we are better able to keep students engaged in the learning taking place and the content being covered.