Mike Kaechele

Tag: pbl

  • Nuclear Idol

    Over the years we have done quite a few projects where the final product is a video of some sort. We usually end up a bit disappointed by the quality of student work compared to the time given/spent working on them. Students either have great content in a very boring video or a great concept that lacks execution. For example I had some great women’s rights videos in concept last year but one had terrible audio and the other had numerous spelling errors. But by the time we saw them it was presentation day and too late to fix them.

    So as we got ready to have students make PSA’s (public service announcements) to answer our grade-wide driving question of “How does nuclear technology affect POWER?” we brainstormed ways to get students to produce higher quality.

    My co-teacher Andy Holly came up with a great idea. We would give them a short time limit before the videos were “due.” (How many teachers know that the more time that you give students the more time they need without actually improving their work?) So we gave them three full days in all of their core classes to come up with a concept, storyboard, film, and edit their PSA. The short time limit kept students from wasting time. On the fourth day we watched them together as a class with a twist.

    We had an emcee and three judges behind a table, American Idol style. One judge was Andy, another was an older student, and the last an instructional technology coach. The “judges” ripped on the videos and critiqued them in good natured fun. Things that happened were judges falling asleep, playing tic tac toe, and a game of Frisbee broke out during an especially boring one. The judges also gave out serious critiques and suggestions to either make them more interesting or higher quality. The best part about this is that the judges were able to be hyper critical of the videos but not offend the students either.

    The final twist came at the end when we announced that these videos were their rough drafts and they had two days to go and re-shoot and fix their videos. The students immediately and excitedly started planning all the ways they wanted to fix them. It was a fun day and the best part was seeing the excitement students’ had toward making their final products better!

  • When Students’ Products Suck

    It’s tough. We want so badly for our students to be successful that sometimes we forget what the road to success looks like. Hint: it’s filled with stuff that’s not very rewatchable. Russ Goerend

    We finished our Choose Your Own Adventure YouTube video project a couple of weeks ago and I have been putting off this post. I was disappointed and a bit embarrassed by how it turned out. Russ summarizes my feelings nicely. It was the culmination of a project studying WWI and WWII from the American perspective. We had each class of 40+ students working on creating these videos stores as a group. Yup, forty students working together on one final product. It was a bit like…

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    It was a challenge organizing this endeavor but we left as much as possible up to the students. Students did a nice job of storyboarding and dividing up into roles such as writers, actors, directors, props, and editors. The breakdowns started when the directors did not get files to the editors immediately. Clips that had poor audio, bad lighting, and mistakes did not get previewed until days after shooting them. Video files were contaminated and some of them were lost. In the end one class ended up with no final product and the other class’ video was incomplete and only partly uploaded to YouTube with very poor editing.

    20131014_083924I wanted to brag about how good this project was and show off an amazing final product. It didn’t happen this time. Yet the students worked hard. They brought in props and costumes and wrote a decent script. They tried to do everything right, but they are not professionals. The first scenes took a long time to film as they figured out set, props, and lighting. The majority of them had zero experience in any of their assigned roles. They were also under a tight time schedule as we had a field trip planned to launch our next, grade-wide project. There was no way that we could not give them more time. From my perspective I wished I had organized the editing part of the project better.

    In PBL we always say that “the process is more important than the product.” In this case I feel that is true. The final product may not have turned out to be anything that the students are proud of but the effort and the skills learned were. I also know that future video projects will be better due to this experience. You don’t win an Oscar in your first movie. So though I was disappointed at first due to unrealistic expectations on my part, upon reflection I am proud of what students did and how they grew from the experience.