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Leigh and I couldn’t believe that a week has flown by already. We still haven’t finished eating the snacks PFAC provided us last Monday! Today we decided to leave at 6 a.m. from Jackson to make sure that we weren’t late this time. We also needed extra time to upload the students’ footage to the computers. Turns out, it’s migration time! If you want to see some wildlife right now, definitely drive towards Pinedale at six in the morning and you will see a plethora. We saw hundreds of elk along with some bighorn sheep, pronghorns, and mule deer spottings. It was spectacular! Leigh is working on a documentary in which she needs footage of the elk and other wildlife migrating for the summer season. So she was very excited to get her camera out and catch some quick footage. As was I!
This week we taught students how to edit on iMovie! We met the first class of 3rd graders at 8:15 a.m. Remember those days when we could wake up at 6 a.m. for elementary school and be bouncing off the walls by 8 a.m.? Well, I was quickly reminded of that. Most of these kids have never used iMovie before so Leigh gave them a little tutorial on the SmartBoard, which is basically a chalkboard on steroids with an IQ of Albert Einstein.
Monday and Tuesday were very exciting days in the classroom! Miss Heather Preble was able to grab 10 Mac laptops from the Pinedale Middle School for the day for her three PEAK program classes (3rd, 4th & 5th grades). I forgot to explain what the PEAK program is in the last blog post. PEAK stands for Peer Evaluation and Analysis of Knowledge. These kids (10-15 per grade) come hang out with Miss Preble for one hour everyday outside of their normal class. In Big Piney, the elementary school provided us with more than enough Mac laptops and iPads! We’re so grateful for the tech folk at Big Piney as they graciously uploaded all the kids footage to the laptops for us, which saved us a lot of time.
The kids picked up iMovie in a jiffy. They were much faster than we had predicted. It was very impressive. Some were finished in no time and ready to learn higher level editing skills, but first they had to record their awesome poems!
Most of the kids followed a specific poetic style, which we were not expecting. There were haikus, sonnets, imagery, and even the iambic pentameter was used by some! Unfortunately, we did not have any microphones for the kids to record on so they had to use the built-in microphone in the laptop. We had to put them in the storage closet to get a good recording with minimal background noise! It was a hoot. Next time we will have to rent microphones to make sure we can get better recordings. If anyone has microphones to donate or rent out, please let us know!
We had to remind the kids a few times to remember to make the videos parallel to the story they were telling in their voiceover. By the end of the class, they were all getting really creative with their clips and the way it meshed with their story! The best videos were the ones where the kids wrote their poems last week right after they took their videos because they made a poem that was completely based on what they shot. For example, one of the boys wrote a poem about wiping out and playing in the snow because his buddy and him did a lot of action shots. In the video they use a lot of slow-mo and reverse effects!
All the kids we taught at Pinedale Elementary finished their voiceovers. It was more difficult to keep all the kids on the same page in Big Piney because we had 20 students in each class, which is a lot for two teachers to handle. A handful of students did not get to record their poem.
All in all we accomplished a lot in a short time. Next week will be really fun because we will have time to premiere some of the kids videos in class!
Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival: Our Blog has MOVED! 
[…] ← Take 2 – Students read their nature poems and learn to edit! April 24, 2013 · 4:03 pm ↓ Jump to Comments […]
hi when was this made