Back in class, this year CEP811, and working on my first assignment: talk about what “Maker” means to you, and do not leave it until the last moment! Fortunately, I took the advice, and started early, which was good because things did not go as planned.
I wanted to talk about what the maker movement means for me as an educator. How do I incorporate these ideas into my classroom. How can I be a part of the maker movement? Like my students, I want to know how my classes will apply to my real life. As fascinating as I found some of the information about makers and making, if it isn’t applicable, I’m wasting my time. Pondering the videos and readings, I realized that teachers have always been a part of the maker movement. It can be more difficult to incorporate at the high school level where I teach, especially in core classes, but becomes a vital tool of engagement at those levels. Students love to create and express themselves, teachers just need to tap into to that more in the assignments and projects they create.
I had my idea. It was time to start the video compilation, and that was where I ran into trouble. The editor, WeVideo, was not the problem. It was pretty easy to use, after watching a couple tutorial videos and playing around with it a bit. It was finding videos with the proper Creative Commons license that was most difficult. I started with the Library of Congress, whose videos are free to use and repurpose. It is a wonderful resource, but I wanted to include some more modern videos. I searched through the Prelinger Archives and found some really fascinating videos in there. (I lost some time to distraction…) Neither of these resources had quite what I was looking to use for my video, so I moved on to Vimeo. I have never been so frustrated with a resource. I needed to sign up for the service, and then I still could not get their search feature to work within the Creative Commons section. I browsed for hours through videos I could not sort, looking for what I wanted. When I finally found it, I could not figure out how to download it. I Googled, I played around with it, but I could not download videos from Vimeo. I took a break and read the blogs of some of my fellow students, watching their videos for inspiration. Lauren said she had the most success with Google Advanced Search, so I tried that. Success at last!
My finished product is below:
Some takeaways from this assignment:
- Making your own videos from scratch is much easier than remixing existing videos.
- When the assignment says give yourself extra time, they really mean it.
- The time constraint on the video was surprisingly difficult to maintain.
- This assignment was very interesting, in the way that a teacher could themselves employ a similar type of project to enhance/elicit student understanding.
Resources:
Dougherty, D. (Actor). (2011). We are makers [Online video]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/dale_dougherty_we_are_makers
Video Resources: