For the Joy of it

Joy.  Three letters.  And yet, so often they’re absent from many classroom environments.  What made me painfully aware of this was Dean Shareski‘s post, written at 3 AM, pondering what role joy has in our teaching and our classrooms.  To be honest, I think if most of us asked our students to sum up their classroom experiences in one word, Joy probably wouldn’t be the word most frequently used.  And yet, with many of the resources that are available to us as teachers, this is a possiblity within our grasp.

When I watched the video I’m just waiting for some Miley, I knew immediately my students would love doing something like this for our first video assignment.  And they did.   I think what they loved even more was having their videos shown to the entire school.  It was their 5 minutes of fame.

Having students shoot and edit a video like this is an easy introduction to making and editing videos.  In my tech class I had four students who are fairly fluent in video creation.  Most of the other students had little, if any, video experience.  Each of these four students became the “expert” in their group who was responsible to teach their fellow group members how to edit a video.  After observing the process for awhile, and a few youtube tutorials, each group member needed to take a turn editing.

While the videos were relatively easy to shoot, editing so that the lyrics were exact with the lip sync proved fairly difficult at times, even for our seasoned editors.  That being said, my students loved this assignment so much that I plan to include it every year.  It’s an easy way to teach video creation, which I think is an important skill for my students to have in the 21st century.  They need to be as fluent in editing video, as they do in reading and writing.

Towards the end of this assignment, one of my students asked me, “What genre would this be?”  To be honest, I don’t know. Is there such thing as a lip sync genre? I’ve noticed that once  a new technology is around for a bit, new genres evolve within it.  And in the world of education, that’s exciting.  It means new possiblities are always on the horizon.