Unleash Your Digital Natives

Multimedia is a buzzword that grabs the attention of students and teachers alike. These days, students are curious about the creation of media that involve still and video images, sound and more. Take advantage of this curiosity by teaching a lesson that also informs students about the importance of context.

Lesson Description:

Students will create their own multimedia presentation. During this lesson, students can choose from a variety of video or sound sources online or they can use audio provided by the teacher. Students will use a software editing program to capture the sound and export it as a WAV file. Then they will identify and look for visual images (about one per every five seconds) to compliment the content. Once they have all the images and video, they can join them with the audio to create movies.

Subject Areas:

Humanities or science, depending on content Technology

Curriculum Standards:

This lesson meets the following National Educational Technology Standards for students:

• Basic operations and concepts
• Social, ethical and human issues
• Technology productivity tools
• Technology communication tools
• Technology research tools

Resources:

This Web site provides access to a variety of audio and video links: www.kidsnetsoft.com/multimedia/introduction.html. Some of these are:

• ABC Podcasting, news reports you can download, www.abc.net.au/services/podcasting
• The Education Podcast Network, a clearinghouse of podcasts for teachers, epnweb.org
• Discovery Education, which provides a range of videos on a broad number of topics, school.discoveryeducation.com/ontv/videoclips.html

The Kidsnetsoft Web site also has links to free software that might be needed for this project, including Adobe Reader, Audacity’s sound editing software, iMovie for Macintoshes, Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10 and RealPlayer. Adobe Photoshop or another image editing program is needed for those who want to maintain image quality and space efficiency.

Grading Rubric:

Students will be given points based on the rubric (available on Kidsnetsoft Web site), which has the following categories: image quality, voice pacing, soundtrack emotion, relevance of images and titles to audio, duration of presentation, copyright laws, and work ethics. Students will also earn points for maintaining documentation of sources and keywords, forms for which are provided on the resource page.

Teaching Tips

• It is critical for the teacher to produce their own visual representation of the audio portion of the movie by completing all the steps in this lesson.
• Some students might not have access to video, so they can simply choose to use still images throughout the movie. If the teacher doesn’t have access to image editing programs, students should seek images close to 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels high.
• Teachers can always use the tools provided to create a different product.