Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Bringing it all together!

So all year long we have kind of stuck with Doodlecast Pro as our go to app for creating class videos.  Mastering an app has paid off and we have created 4 wonderful videos as part of our social studies unit.

Our unit is about our community and the focus of this project was to identify buildings within our School neighbourhood.  We brainstormed a list of buildings and then set out with our Grade 7 computer buddies to take photos of the buildings.

Prior to heading out, we discussed how to take good pictures as well as taking more than 1 picture so we could later choose the best one.  Of course we also talked about traffic safety, sticking together as a group and turn taking.  When all the pictures were taken we headed back to school.

The next day we got into groups and used the Doodlecast app to create our videos.  We developed a list of criteria needed when we talked about each picture.  We said we needed to name the building and it's purpose as well as the community helper that worked there.  As a group with an adult supervisor, we talked about each picture and decided what we should say.  The adult wrote it down and then each student had a turn to read the description.  Students had the opportunity to insert the pictures and format them to fit the screen.  I am confident that most students could create their own Doodlecast if they had to!

The final step was to convert it to a youtube video - super easy and fast to do which is why I LOVE Doodlecast and then we embedded it on our class wiki!

I even learned something new with this project!!!  Voice CAN be deleted without losing the whole project!!! YAY!  That makes this app even better.  You need to click on the picture until to opens up and little box with the word trim in the bottom right corner, you can then pull the recording back to the previous picture and click trim.  It will delete just the voice for that picture.  It also deletes the picture but it is easy to reinsert!

Enjoy one of our 4 videos! I know we will enjoy viewing them tomorrow!