I got roped into filming The Year 9 Mini Enterprise project last week and really enjoyed it. My experience with taking and editing digital video is limited to little clips taken on my stills camera, but my experience with podcasting, both on this site (its been a while I know) and in schools stood me in good stead. Plus from Adam Curry to the Twits I’ve listened to a lot of grass roots media in the last 2 years.
So rather than just take some panoramas of the Hall I went round and talked to everyone thrusting a camera in their faces and tried to get the low down on Mini Enterprise, which I didn’t know anything about. Basically pupils are given a stall in the hall or on the field and have to make money by selling things to other students, teachers and parents (although not many parents came). Most were really good at talking about their businesses and the problems they had faced.
Some of the video was shown straight from the camera onto the projector in the hall at the end of the day and the kids were really exited about seeing themselves starring on the big screen.
The best type of editing is done at the time with the record button and I was happy with how well the raw video hung together. I was in Robert Scoble mode I just wanted to compress it and dump it on the network (eg. here) but you just can’t do that in schools. Anyway expectations were escalating after the preview in the assembly, so I thought I would try editing to give the film some idea of start and concentrate some clips showing the different kinds of things the kids were getting up to at the begining before getting into the meatier conversations.
The only firewire cables in the school are nailed to the desks next to the G5 Macs which probably isn’t a bad idea, but I’m not a mac man and I had to get up to speed with iMovie. The only time I get to see apple applications is on Steve Jobs keynotes, and I;ve always wanted to have a go with the iLife suite, but frankly, its not as easy to get going with iMovie as it is with Movie maker. I found it all a bit slow too.
Anyway a couple of sessions later (long sessions) I had my first cut to take home on DVD (used iDVD) and show my flat mates. They actually watched it from begining to end. I took their comments on board and produced version 2 which at 38 minutes long took well over an hour to encode and burn.
The question now is what to do with the final video, Burning DVDs can save a lot of privacy problems associated with publishing images of kids online, and I’m new to teaching and to the school, we need to work through all the issues. But as a brainstorming exercise I wanted to list the potential collaborations that could come from sharing it (in current format or in smaller bits) on the network.
1. During the holidays, Y9 students could write online comments on individual busineses, how they presented themselves and how they understood the issues.
2. Y8 children could also see what happened and start thinking about ideas for next year.
3. Parents could comment and maybe offer suggestions and future collaborations eg. I run a business and I can offer X help next year or I would like to offer work experience placements to Y number of children next year. I believe that this type of communication is more likely to happen (and for the school to reply) if they watch it online and have a comment box to type in rather than if they watching in the living room and send a message later.
4. The whole of the school will be talking about the best “performances” DVD distribution will mean less people get chance to see it. They can send friends links to the best bits.
5. Other schools can assess their Mini Enterprise experiences with our school’s, and maybe get in touch to collaborate eg. by pairing up groups to provide consulatancy advice to each other.
[...] Jon outlines how he has used this method to improve his own public speaking. This strikes a chord for me too after editing my recent first documentary film . My own podcast performances have improved over the last couple of years – starting to teach might have something to do with it too
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[...] In the assembly at the end, more than one of the business people who volunteer to make these Young Enterprise days possible, said that today had been the best day that they had ever had in schools doing this project. If you ever get to see the film I made last year (sorry not online, DVD only) of this same group doing their Y9 Mini Enterprise last year you would see why. [...]