Grade 8 China Alive Yangshou April 29, 2008
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Same video. Different server. Testing streaming quality. Feedback welcomed.
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Grade 8 China Alive Yangshou April 29, 2008
Posted by tbanaszewski in Uncategorized.Tags: Yangshou China_Alive SAS
1 comment so far
Green Screen Yourself Back in Time March 4, 2008
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7th Graders worked in teams to research a person from the Renaissance then filmed an interview of that person. The most engaging interviews were then selected for green screening. If you're running Leopard on the Mac, you can use PhotoBooth and easily green screen without needing a green backdrop. You can even insert video as a backdrop. But for this project we wanted students to film using a camcorder. The built-in iSight camera on a Mac is decent, but limiting in terms of controlling light. This is really important for green screening.
iMovie has a $25 plug-in pack that enables easy green screening. This is what I used for most of the videos. It was a simple process of filming the students in front of a green wall, importing the footage, importing the backdrop image, selecting Effects>Green Screen>Apply. It took about 20-30 minutes on a MacBook for each clip to render. Some glitches with this plug-in forced me to do all of them over in Final Cut Pro.
If you want the highest quality possible and have access to Final Cut Pro, there's a fantastic tutorial on YouTube. I'd post the link here, but it's blocked again right now in China. In about 40 minutes, I taught myself how to green screen (or chroma key) in FCP. In FCP, you can also scale your video to match the depth of your background image/video.
Here's the first phase of the Galileo interview.
Before
After
Queen Isabella
Seussical the Musical Success! March 3, 2008
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SAS Puxi middle school students recently delighted the crowd with their adaptation of the famous work of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.
SAMS 7/8 Choir February 29, 2008
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Blue Jupiter's recent a capella performance at the Shanghai American School had a clear impact on the Puxi middle school students. Listen to this sampling of the 7/8 Choir rehearsing for an up-coming performance. For the complete songs, look to the right and scroll down.
Podcasting 101 February 11, 2008
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Famous radio programs such as The Shadow may have been replaced by television, but many speculate that the current ease of creating and publishing your own audio shows may have sparked a resurgence of the lost art.
Practice What You Preach January 23, 2008
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We all know that students do not retain much technical information that has been delivered by talking at them. This week, I gave my brief Not One More Boring Powerpoint presentation to four 6th Grade classes. It's meant to highlight the general rules to follow when creating oral and visual presentations:
- Choose your words carefully, avoid large blocks of text on a slide
- Use big, engaging images that fill large portions of the slide
- Use animations, music and movie clips to ENHANCE not DISTRACT
- Use solid backgrounds and clear fonts (nothing smaller than 24pt usually)
After the first class, I realized students would not be applying these presentation techniques for at least a few days. And for most middle school students remembering information from one day to the next is a real honest challenge.
So, after the first class I changed the lesson and had students download this practice slide and apply the techniques that we just finished discussing. It was also a good opportunity to teach them how to animate an object on the screen as they were trying to draw attention to the idea of traveling down the Nile.
This is the practice slide I had them download from their del.icio.us page and told them to apply the Powerpoint (basic graphic design) techniques we discussed in class. I'll post their improved slides soon.
Science Spotlight: Adaptability in a Virtual Lab January 13, 2008
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What's the most important component when trying to wire a virtual house with series and parallel circuits? Plenty of wire? High voltage battery? In this spotlight, a 6th Grade student discusses the important role that adaptability plays in problem-solving.
Food for the Future January 10, 2008
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After learning how the ancient Mesopotamians solved their food challenges with innovative agricultural techniques, students in Nancy Bell's Social Studies classes responded to the question of "What are the modern techniques that we've developed to help us meet the growing food needs of the planet?"
