Sunday, March 27, 2011
Unit Plan
Trying to come up with a topic for a unit plan was a little difficult for me. Being able to pick anything at all always leaves a lot of room for me to want to change my mind. That being said, this is a work in progress, but this is my potential unit plan idea: Students will be learning about film and how it is able to confront issues and convey messages to an audience. The unit could explore using film to pose important questions or commentary on current social issues. During the unit, I'd like for the final 'project' to be a short film that the students can create on their own. This way they'd be able to explore writing a script, using different technolgy to create a film, and doing their own research on good examples of films that they believe carry a strong message. I guess an important question would be how I could easily relate this directly to my students: why should they think this is useful information? That might be a little hard to communicate directly so I'd need to work on that. Also, what exactly would the grading rubrik look like for their final film? How can I judge their creative process? Like I said, a work in progress, but I think that it has potential!
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I really like your idea for a final project - I always loved making films in high school and middle school and I think it's a great way to get kids into what you are teaching. ALso the idea that they can write their own scripts would be great!!
ReplyDeleteHi Taylor, I agree that this is a kernel of an idea with a lot of promise. Next week, we'll take up media literacy, and there will be some ideas and resources there. If you need some supplemental resources, I have a number of texts you could borrow. One thought I have, think about what type of media analysis you want students to do. Using fiction film for analysis is great--but having students create through own fictional film is really a complex process that could likely take weeks, if not months. It might be more strategic to think in terms of exploring a film (and/ or other types of mass media) with a powerful, relevant message to middle schoolers. Then have students work in teams to create a 30-60 second public service announcement on a related topic, theme, or idea. As you planning continues to evolve, let me know how I can help.
ReplyDeleteI agree that creating a film can be a really long process. In one of my classes in high school, we created a music video based off of how we interpretted a song (we did Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel). It was cool because we got to pick a song that meant somethin to us so it was really easy to make it relateable. Some students made a video through images they got from the interent; other students actually created video. We used Window's Movie Maker to put it together and it turned out to be a great project.
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