Reflection - Final Project

June 8, 2009 – Bernice in a Box

The Story and the Excuse

The dog ate my homework.  The winter months came and went like a flash, as did the spring months.  I have a busy job at school and I’m on too many school committees.  All of those are good reasons why I didn’t finish on time.   

 The truth is that I was having trouble coming up with a story/project that was meaningful and had some value to the Anglo American School who paid for my class. 

 I regret that you won’t see my project on YouTube, You Teacher or any other public space.  The Anglo American school is a private Pre-K-12 institution which allows parents to determine whether or not their children can be photographed for external use.  I was delighted to be able to use students from a Grade 12 International Baccalaureate  (IB) Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class.

 The story follows my theme of curiosity, wondering, and history.   Our first assignment was to post a picture and tell about it.  I posted a picture of a total stranger taken on the street in Kiev.  The woman was selling antique hand-made “towels”.  My comments were really questions

• ·    Where does she get them?
  
• ·      How did they end up on her table?
  
• ·      Why are they not valued anymore?

I am a collector of odd things.  I also work at the end of a long corridor containing the AAS High School English and Social Studies classrooms.  I observed a class of students working on a project.  They had papers and potographs of a woman named Bernice.  In short, their assignment was to write about Bernice from what they could glean from the papers, photographs, and interviews with her relatives.

Finally, I found something to spark my imagination.  What if I were to tell the story of how Bernice came to be studied by hundreds of students?  Could I make this work?  Would anyone be interested?  I had boxes of raw material – and I finally decided to “just go for it” and named by story after the assignment:  Bernice in a Box. 

The Technology and the Planning

Creating the movie was a little more intimidating than choosing the subject.   I read several students papers that had been turned in.  I looked through every paper in the box.  I had ideas but who was my audience?  I wanted my project to be useful. 

 In the end, my audience is future students who will do this project each year in their TOK class.  Bernice will be introduced via a digital story as they begin their assignment.  

 Even though this project was longer than the last project, the elements were the same: planning, storyboarding, gathering images, finding music and putting it together.  

 Once I decided on Bernice in a Box, I began to write the script in my mind.  I had the beginning and the end but not the middle.  Days would go by and the project still attracted me. 

 The hardest part was doing the storyboard and finally one Sunday morning I made a deal with myself – I couldn’t leave the house until it was done.  That was a big motivator – as well as the fact that time was passing.  Storyboard – check!  Script – check!  The images had been scanned months before, pictures had been gathered from the class project, and assignments had been read for passages that could be used in the script.

The script was easy thanks to the excellent suggestions by Dr. Ohler.

Production

The technical part of this project was a joint effort between AAS’s AV technician, Amerigo Tatel and me.  As I said about my one minute project:

“We are an incredibly well resourced school. I manage a library with 10 employees including AV services. Our AV technician, Amerigo Tatel, is incredibly well versed in video and helps students and teachers with projects as part of his job. I certainly give credit to Amerigo for sitting down with me each step of the way and being my tutor. He helped me, guided me, and didn’t let me spend hours floundering - from the recording, to the audio editing, to showing me how to put the music in, etc. etc. etc. It was hard and I don't think that I could have done it all myself even though we have every video program known to man on our servers - and what we don't have we can get. He would say – “let’s do this with this picture to make it more interesting” or “the picture you picked isn’t good enough” or “record your message in segments”. Yes, this is my work and yes I had help. We should all be so fortunate to work in schools like mine.”

With thanks to:

·   AAAS for supporting my professional development

·      Dr. Jason Ohler for his suggestions and encouragement

·      Beverly Racine for sharing her Aunt Bernice and Bernice’s Box

·      The AAS students who researched and wrote about Bernice and helped in the production

·      Mr. Amerigo, Mr. AV at AAS who loves kids and always helps teachers

Final Thoughts

I look forward to meeting the 2009-2010 students who will write about Bernice and using this digital story as an introduction to their project.  I look forward to showing this to our entire faculty as an introduction to our next PD Day.  I look forward getting the story to Dr. Ohler and I don’t believe I want to be a moviemaker.  I liked the behind the scenes part and not the production.  I was fortunate to have a “teacher” in my own library that I could ask for help..  And finally, I learned a lot and was glad to stretch out of my comfort zone.