A Reflective Journey Through...
The tutorials in this lesson were excellent! Although I have used our school's green screen for a few projects in the past, I really enjoyed thinking about new ways to use green screen technology for both videos and photos and to take the time to learn some advanced skills and techniques.
This spring, the third grade teachers at my school and I decided to use the Green Screen by Do Ink app to enable students to create fun, expressive commercials persuading viewers to visit either China or Ghana. Since students had studied both countries in their classrooms, they used their notes to develop enthusiastic paragraphs about famous foods, festivals/celebrations, and attractions. Using a model I wrote about England and the templates the teachers and I created for China and Ghana, students worked on one paragraph of their commercial during each library class. In the classroom, each student then drew a background featuring an attraction within his/her chosen country. Finally, we were ready to practice and film using the Do Ink app! While filming this month, I asked our district's technology specialist to show me some tricks for adjusting the camera angle, cropping students' legs within the camera view, folding the green screen over part of a student, draping it over a table, etc. to make it look like students were standing behind the Great Wall, sitting in a boat, or placed wherever else they wanted to be within their backgrounds. Since we had five classes of students to film, he filmed some of the videos in the classrooms while I filmed in the library. Here are the final videos we created for one of our five classes! Strangely, until watching the tutorials in this lesson, I had never considered using the green screen app for photos (as opposed to videos). I'm not sure why that never occured to me, but I am so grateful for the idea now! Over the past month, I have been trying to take photos of each of my 27 classes for a library trivia challenge for next Tuesday's Open House. For the trivia challenge, my idea was to have a photo of each class posing with their best thinking faces, a question regarding libraries or books underneath (something that the class has learned in the library this year), and then a QR code that families scan to hear the class saying the answer. This was a great idea until week after week I was missing students in a few of the classes and was therefore having trouble taking whole-class photos. The tutorials in this lesson gave me a solution: I could take a class photo without the absent students, then take absent students' individual photos in front of the green screen, remove the green background, and add them into the class photo afterwards. Here is an example of one of those classes. The student on the far right in the back row is the one who I was able to add in later. It's not perfect, but I'm well on my way to learning some new photo editing techniques. So cool! Although I had used the green screen for filming projects in the past, learning these advanced techniques for both photos and videos has given me the confidence to use the green screen in even more innovative ways throughout the future! Thanks again for the inspiration!
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