Digital Documentaries 08: Phase One

Past years' fifth grade movies have been somewhat mediocre overall, so I decided to a) start giving them more iMovie experience before fifth grade, and b) have students put more time and energy into the movie planning process this year so that when they are making the movies they're really just assembling ingredients they've prepared beforehand.

To that end, I had students first create GoogleDocs presentations of movie proposals--one slide each for 3-5 possible topics.



I had them use GoogleDocs both so that they could work on it at home if they chose (a few did) and so that they could use GoogleDocs smoothly when they need it for their class writing pieces later in the year. (They set up accounts last year, but not everyone used them, so we spent the first 2 periods resetting their passwords.) Then I chose or helped them choose the topic that would work best from the 3-5 they had proposed, and their next task was to create a presentation of 4-6 slides that would be a specific plan for their movies: what pictures (These are KenBurns style iMovies, not video), words, and sounds they would have in each part.




For both presentations, I gave students step-by-step direction sheets, shared my example presentations with them in GoogleDocs, and taught minilessons. They had 3 class periods for each.

I realize now I should have taken this much more slowly. I should have had them read the direction sheet aloud in a distraction-free environment. I should have had them "unpack" my presentations in class and talk about what they noticed and what they could do in their own presentations. (I also should have spent more time with them at the very beginning watching actual examples of 1-2 minute documentaries like the ones they'll be making. I'm sharing these examples after the plan is done, but should do some before as well.) I didn't do this, and as a result had about half of the kids confused in a variety of ways, like doing presentations all about a particular topic instead of 3-5 proposals. After getting this sorted out, some kids only wrote 1-2 proposals, or very incomplete proposals, but I let them move on to the second presentation because I didn't want them to get further behind.

Yesterday was the last class period for the second presentation, and out of 27 kids, 6 finished and are ready to start their movies, 8 are close, 12 will probably need 2 more class periods, and for 2 of them, I'm finally accepting that I will need to set up their Google accounts to remember them because they have wasted so much type mistyping their email and password, which is written on a piece of paper in front of them.

(In fairness to some kids, we did have some browser incompatibility problems, too. It used to be that GDocs worked with Camino, but not Safari, but with presentations it seems to be the other way around. Firefox would be ideal, but that's a story for another post.)

The moral of the story seems to be this: 6 class periods is not enough time for most fifth graders to create a proposal and a plan for a 1-2 minute movie in GoogleDocs, and if I want this project to succeed in the future, I will need to either:
a) have the fifth grades twice a week (sadly, this term I don't have 3/4 of them at all.)
b) get classroom teachers on board (a likelihood with some and very doubtful with others)
c) give students an option to use paper or the program of their choice (a word processor, presentation program, or mindmap program) instead of GoogleDocs
d) make sure that strugglers have helping partners set up beforehand, and get those kids in separately in small groups for extra support. (Some teachers do digital documentaries as a group project to help support strugglers, but I really want kids to get the whole experience, which doesn't happen if you break down the project into smaller jobs.)

The good news is that I can use what I've learned here with the other 3 fifth grade classes I hope to have in the spring. The bad news, as always, is that this class ends up the unfortunate guinea pigs.

There are so many great teachers doing digital documentaries with their students and posting about it, but I haven't found any yet who are doing it with classes of 25-32 kids in a once-a-week setting. Surely they must be out there, right?

Kids and Passwords II

Part of the confusion some kids had setting up their accounts could be due to the design of my password sheet, which had 4 boxes: username, email address, ps116.org password, and GoogleDocs password. The boxes on the sheet were similar visually to the ones where they type their passwords online, but the sequence of boxes on the sheet didn't correspond to the sequence of boxes on the login screens. The sequence in my redesign, while not as logical, does correspond to the login screens (with a section for the username and password they enter at ps116.org, and a section for the email address and password they enter at GoogleDocs), and should lessen confusion somewhat.

The only problem is that this year's kids are all set up, so I may have to wait until next September to try it.

The next quandary is whether to let kids choose their own passwords (which many often forget without the password sheet) or have them use a formula (which is less secure, but also teaches them a strategy they can use for managing multiple passwords later in life, and which some still forget). I've tried both and neither is perfect. Anyone else have experience with this?

GoogleDocs in fourth grade

Despite great frustration on the part of about 1/3 of my students who forgot the .org at the end of their emails, or typed ps.116 instead of ps116, or put .com instead of .org, or mistyped their name or password, or any one of the many things that can go wrong when setting up or using an account where email and password are required, my fourth graders are getting acclimated to GoogleDocs.

They will be making presentations in GoogleDocs as proposals for possible topics for their blogs. They won't be presenting the presentations, but I find the format makes it easier for them to organize their thoughts than with a plain blank page.

I scaffolded the heck out of the account set-up: had them write down their username, their email address, and their password before setting up the account, so all they had to do was type what was on the paper; warned them that they had to type carefully and remember the .org and no spaces, etc., but still a full third of them didn't get it in the first class period. Not to mention the kids who had trouble with the captcha or the email verification. (I explain to them that there are mean people in the world who send out robots over the internet to clog up websites and break them, so they have to prove that they are not one of those robots by reading curvy letters and checking email, which robots can't do.)

Anyone have suggestions for easing this process with a group of 32 fourth graders?
(I wonder if GoogleApps for my domain would solve the problem by allowing me to set up the accounts for them, but I was daunted by implementation complications.)

My example blog topic proposal for my students: