The Grade 6s created short videos about famous medical researchers using Animoto

 

The Grade 6s researched famous medical people and created Animoto videos summarising what they found.

What is Animoto?

 Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows, and customized web-based presentations. We used the free version. 

Structure of the lesson

1. First of all we went over the process of creating a video using Animoto. 

2. After that each student chose a famous medical person to research. 

3. The students had to find and download free-to-use images of their famous person to use in their videos 

4. For content the students needed to think about the following questions: 

•  Who was this person – when was he/she born and in which country do/did they live? 
• What made this person famous? 
• Something about his/her early life
•  Interesting facts about this person’s reason for fame. 

Structure of the video 

• It should use about 7 frames with images text that summarises key points about the famous person. 
• It should include music. 

Here are three examples. 

The students used their online names on their videos. 

1. Dustin: Edward Jenner
https://animoto.com/play/PPBUzI3QJFo6NBat4cdTNw

 

2. Blake: Louis Pasteur
https://animoto.com/play/nccdBoPE1AShXlStqQWFAQ

   

3. Grace: Alexander Fleming
https://animoto.com/play/j0NDvA8CRgx1gR2jgvqMUw

  

The Grade 7s created videos about famous people using Animoto

There are many different ways to present research in a classroom. In this lesson we decided to use the free version of a video-creation tool, ‘Animoto’. www.animoto.com.How did we go about the lesson?

1. First of all we went over the process of creating a video using Animoto.

2. After that each student chose a famous person to research from the Biography section of the Ducksters website: https://www.ducksters.com/biography

3. The students had to find and download free-to-use images of their famous person to use in their videos

4. For content the students needed to think about the following questions:Who is this person – when was he/she born and in which country do/did they live?

• What made this person famous?
• Something about his/her early life
• What did this person study after school?
• Interesting facts about this person’s reason for fame.

Structure of the video

• It should use about 7 frames with writing which summarises key points about the famous person.
• It should include music.

Here are some examples of the created projects:

Andy Wahl by Casbru: https://bit.ly/3DWGRXz

Donald Mustard by Calcam: https://bit.ly/31dIZfe

Nikolai Tesla by Ethkau: https://bit.ly/3120sqJ

Grade 7s created stories from pictures and turned them into videos

I love thinking of different ways to get my classes writing and seeing themselves as writers and story tellers. I used the following method with Grade 6 and 7 this year, but in this post I will only talk about Grade 7.

I used the following process with Grade 7:

The elements of a good story

As always, our  lesson concentrated on the elements of a good story – characters, setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution to the project. We practised this in different ways orally in the lesson.

Tell the story from pictures

Some time ago I downloaded some wonderful Creative Commons stories from the African Storybook website https://www.africanstorybook.org/  . I removed the title and the words, but kept the art and details of the original stories as a Creative Commons requirement. I put the art on to PowerPoints and I numbered the stories. Each student in Grade 6 and 7 chose a number. Their task would be to turn the pictures into their own story and make sure they included the elements of a story. 

Create a video of your story using Screencastify

The Grade 7s then used the Chrome extension,  Screencastify, to narrate their stories and turn them into videos.  

Examples of the stories

1. Original: The Girl Who Could Fly by Ingrid Schechter. llustration - Ingrid Schechter and Amir Bachir António Necas. Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 Source: www.africanstorybook.org

Casseddie’s Big Surprise by Casbru

2. Original: A Hot Saturday by Nathi and David; Translation - Nathi and David; Illustration - Wiehan de Jager Language – English. Creative Commons: Attribution 3. Source www.africanstorybook.org

A Hot Saturday by Ethkau

The Hottest Saturday by Geolev