Multimodal Journey: Week 2: Week of January 21st

After exploring Windows Movie Maker and Photo Story I have decided that I am going to use Windows Movie Maker to show my own learning journey through my Bachelor of Education and my Masters of Education thus far. During my Bachelor of Education, I had many key learning moments that have been recorded digitally and I would like to bring these into my exploration of multimodal work. These pieces have helped form and enhance my own personal learning journey. They will add another layer to this piece which will help enhance my learning experience with Windows Movie Maker.

I plan to incorporate a video of my grade 8’s and the dance that we created through a drama activity. The idea for this activity came from a dance instructor did a workshop with my Bachelor of Education class. For this exercise, I asked students to find a partner that they would not normally work with as we were going to learn something new about our classmates. Once students had found an appropriate partner, one of the partners was selected to leave the room (with another teacher) for a moment so I could provide instructions to the remaining students. The students who remained were given a sheet of paper and instructed to write down their partner’s body movements when they answered the questions I was going to ask them when they returned. The partners in the hallway, for simplicity we will call them Group A, were under the understanding that their partners in the gym, Group B, would be writing down their answers to my questions. After both groups were explained their roles, Group A re-entered the gymnasium. I told Group A that they were to answer the questions that I asked to their partner. I had five questions for this group to respond to. Each question began with “I Am From...” and finished with “my favourite food”, “my best family memory”, “something I pass on the way to school”, “my favourite family saying” and “my favourite thing to do”. Group A was shocked to learn that Group B was writing down their body movements and that we were going to create a dance based on what they recorded. I then asked Group B to share with their partners the body movements that they recorded and to select two movements that they wanted to turn into a dance move. I gave the students some time to work through this and provided them with music. Each partnership was given the opportunity to perform their movements for their peers. After this, each partnership joined another partnership and they were asked to put the moves together to create a new ‘dance’. This continued until we had a full class dance which was inclusive of all students one dance move. Initially I was slight hesitant to do this activity with grade eight students because dance was not necessarily a dance unit that all students were enthusiastic about. By the end of it, I was pleasantly surprised with the results, especially with a few of the male students, and how they took up this activity. Some of them were so inspired that they started a break dancing club at recess and asked for me to come watch them.

I have a short clip of the dance instructor working with some students in my program. I may decide to incorporate this into my learning journey, but I am not too pleased with my filming job. I had turned the camera to get another angle not realizing that when I filmed it would ruin what I was trying to show. This was a technological learning moment for me with digital photography!

I am going to have to see what formats I need to have my pictures and videos in so that I can incorporate them into Windows Movie Maker. There are certain videos that I think will work best if I use certain sections of them. I will have to explore Movie Maker to see if I am able to do this type editing here, or if I will need to search for external programs in order to splice specific parts to use.