Roundtable 3: Digital Moving Images In the Classroom
Northeast Historic Film Roundtable III, in support of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, brought together people and issues important to educators and students interested in creating and using digital moving images.
- Sharing MLTI Moving Image Projects – Gary Geisler (Acrobat PDF, 1.9 MB)
- Learning Objects and Metadata – Ruben Puentedura (Acrobat PDF, 237 KB)
- Metadata Hootenanny – Catherine Weiss (Acrobat PDF, 110 KB)
- What are Creative Commons Licenses? – Peter Suber (Acrobat PDF, 34 KB)
- Roundtable Contact Information (Acrobat PDF, 134 KB)
Hosted by Northeast Historic Film with support from the Maine Humanities Council August 28, 2004. Links and affiliations may no longer be current.
Online Access to Digital Moving Image Files
Gary Geisler, Ph.D., Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, presented The Open Video Project (http://www.open-video.org), a publicly accessible digital video library he helped develop. Geisler’s presentation addressed situations MLTI participants may face when sharing moving image projects with an introduction to ways Open Video might be useful.
Metadata
Adding metadata or “data about data” to digital moving image files is increasingly important. Teachers and students need to add metadata to their productions in order to determine future uses of their work, and to better practice research and contextualization. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D., Hippasus, presented Learning Objects and Metadata, in which he discussed the importance of metadata structure in creating and storing digital objects, and Catherine Weiss reported on Metadata Hootenanny.
Rights and Student Releases
When archival footage is incorporated in a new production attribution must be given to the original producer — just as quotations are footnoted in a paper or sources are cited in a bibliography. Digital technology’s seamless copying and sharing has created new issues and opportunities in regard to rights. Peter Suber, Ph.D., Public Knowledge’s Director of the Open Access project, gave a presentation on Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) licenses.
Protecting the rights, privacy, and safety of students and their work is an important responsibility in this digital age. Online publishing is a great way to showcase student achievement and at the same time schools are responsible for many levels of rules while anticipating parental concerns. John Robbins, Technology Integrators, and Crystal Priest, Guilford, shared examples of agreements including elements of best practice for media release forms for school districts: http://www.technologyintegrators.org/mediareleasesuggest.htm
iMovie examples in the Classroom
Teachers Nancy Hohmann and Mary MacKinnon from Oxford Hills schools have been using iMovie in their classrooms with students of a variety of ages and have had an annual iMovie Festival at their high school. Nancy Hohmann brought an example of third grade students who interviewed a town elder and created an iMovie documentary. Mary MacKinnon has created lesson plans for teachers who want to start using iMovie. Contact Nancy Hohmann and Mary MacKinnon for further information.
Former seventh grade Language Arts teacher and now principal of Blue Hill Consolidated School, Fred Cole, has used iMovie in his classroom for three years. This past year students wrote original screenplays, directed, acted in, and produced short iMovies as part of their curriculum. Fred discussed and showed a clip from a dramatic production in which a student reveals his homosexuality to friends.
Apple Computer New England K-20 Market Development Executive Bob Trikakis presented Apple’s new digital documentary filmmaking solution for the classroom. Information can be found on the Apple web site at http://www.apple.com/education/digitalmedia/.
iMovie using Archival Footage
Northeast Historic Film’s Education Outreach Coordinator Judy McGeorge presented an example of using digital video from NHF’s collections in an iMovie production. Video of John F Kennedy’s speech at the University of Maine on October 19, 1963 is one of 19 titles available to educators in MiniDV format. Kennedy’s speech marked the first anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was one month before Kennedy’s assassination. McGeorge used JFK’s speech and demonstrated Aquamind’s Notetaker software for organizing images, web sites, and notes.
A list of NHF titles available for educators to borrow in MiniDV format is available online.
Native American History Sudies in Maine
James Eric Francis, Penobscot Nation Cultural and History Department historian, spoke on resources for teaching of the history and culture of the Wabanaki people of Maine. He showed a clip from a new production, Invisible, produced with filmmaker David Westphal, which addresses racism and the Wabanaki experience. Invisible incorporates archival footage from the Nicholas Smith Collection at Northeast Historic Film.
Maureen Smith, Ph.D., director of the University of Maine Native American Studies Program, gave an update on the Concentrated Areas of Studies for teaching about Maine’s Native Americans as required by LD 291.
