Technology Issues Can Cause a Lot of Down Time

It's crazy how fast the year is passing. My students and I are now in our second unit of teh semester in World Studies which is Western Civ. In order for the studnets to understand how western worldviews developed, my partner and I decided to take two full class periods explaining teh five western worldviews: Superiority/Domination, Representative Government, Humanism/Seclarism, Rationalism, and Individualism.

After introducing the worldviews to the students they picked groups of 4 and each group pulled a worldview out of a hat. Which ever W/V they picked, their group was supposed to create a video skit of a modern day situation depicting the worldview. The student creativity was amazing. A I walked around and saw the different planning sessions it amazed me how the students coud creatively dispaly their understanding of very hard topics to concepts to grasp.
We provide the students with 3 digital camaras and others helped out by bringing cameras of their own. It seemed that we had everyhting under control.

The skits were great, they were recorded on teh cameras and the student videos were ready to go. We continued the unit by using Greece as a microcosm for understanding how the Worldviews develoed by using primary source documents, video, and even having our own olympics to further show the worldviews at work. We focused on one W/V each day and the groups who created video skits for that particular W/V served as the intro to each day. There were about 3-4 videos we had to show for each W/V and this is where I proved to not be very technologically savvy. The videos took a while to load. I had to learn how to transfer the video onto teh comp, what types of file to save the videos under, and how to pull them up for the studnets. THis took a long time because as I mentioned my technology skills are not up to par. This created a lot of side talk, frustration on my part, and a lot of anxious students.

I will still have to sa that there were nothing but positives that came out of doing this activity. The students were able to use technology, I was able to learn a lot about cameras, video, and computer files, and the skits wer wonderful. Though technology can malfunction and cause a little frustration, implementing it into the classroom always makes the activities ten times better.