Videos!

I loved Shafer's ideas about making videos and film a personal way for students to engage in learning and to interpret a text.  I think turning a text into a film is a fantastic way to show that a student understands what is happening, how a character feels, and what the character's environment is like.  I loved trying to imagine what a character's bedroom looks like.  If students are assigned to make a video, they can make all aspects of the text and character come to life rather than just writing it down.

I enjoyed Diane's account of how the digital videos improved her teaching and her classroom.  Adding this new technology and new medium of interpretation to the classroom entirely changed how she teaches and thinks.  It is nice to know that improving a classroom can be as easy as doing something new.
 
Although I love the idea of video assignments, I will confess that I am a fanatic hand waver if I hear the words, "You will be making a video for this class."  I freak out.  I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to film.  I'm not even competent or at all confident with Windows Movie Maker, which can be as simple as uploading pictures and putting in words and audio.  It sounds so easy, but I have a very difficult time putting my ideas and thoughts into that medium.  I am very nervous about the video we will have to make in this class and the book trailer I will have to make for Young Adult Lit.  Even though I know there will be people available to help me and it really isn't that difficult, I still stress out a lot over using technology for creative purposes.

My first video assignment that required actual filming was my Senior video for my high school English class.  Thankfully this was an all-class project and I barely had to do anything.  We even hired another student to do the filming and editing for us because we wanted it to be perfect.  Although this video was supposed to connect multiple books and show interaction between different characters and incorporate everything we had learned since freshman year, it actually ended up being incredibly silly and not interpretative at all.  The teacher took no part in the video process, offered no advice or suggestions, and ended up not even grading us on it because she was not able to watch it before the school year ended. It was actually pretty disappointing.  I think that if we had focused more on one book or even two similar books, we could have incorporated more interpretation and our script would have been more uniform.  Instead, all 13 of us ended up writing part of the script for different characters.  We didn't compare them or fit them together at all.  Also, our teacher should have taken more of an active role in the process rather than just asking us how we were doing with it every week.