Today in digital technology we were learning about ‘movie making’ and why movie making has links to many areas of the curriculum.  The first area of the curriculum that we link to movie making could be Literacy, for a child to work within a team to create a movie they must be able to communicate well and to take onboard other classmates ideas which can be a difficult skill.  “Film-making is a collaborative process often requiring an ‘army’ of people to bring a final movie into reality.” according to Porter (2004, p.38).  A CFE learning experience and outcome for this would be:

LT 2 – 02a When I engage with others, I can respond in ways appropriate to my role, show that I value others’ contributions and use these to build on thinking.

Numeracy can also be linked to movie making as the said activity involves critical thinking and problem solving skills for example, in the movie trailer app on the ipad the app tells the movie makers how many seconds there are to work with.  The children then need to decide which slides are to be still images and other slides that will be moving images. This was a common problem that we came across today while making our movie trailer, we over came it by working together and allowing the editors to work on it while the others completed various parts of the trailer.  An experience and outcome used here could be:

MNU 2 – 10b I can carry out practical tasks and investigations involving timed events and can explain which unit of time would be most appropriate to use.

The Technology link to the curriculum when movie making is a little more obvious, as we plan to use iPads, iPhones, Macs and smart boards.  However what we see again is the use of ‘Multimodal’ which we have seen in previous weeks in our digital technology class.  When you use a combination of two or more of the 5 semiotic systems a movie/trailer becomes multimodal, which we know can reach out to our young learners in many different ways, ensuring we can keep there attention and make learning relevant. The Scottish Government believe that when these kind of tools are used effectively they will speed up learning and increase the depth of the learning in the classroom which contributes to raising attainment, The Scottish Government (2015).

Health and Wellbeing is very much an area of the curriculum that can be found in movie making that we were studying today.  When you plan, create and complete a movie with your class mates, there comes a great sense of achievement which I experienced today.  The satisfaction, laughter, fun and confidence boost you feel can only be a positive thing when learning and is something I wish to take with me into a classroom.  It also gives children/adults alike to get creative and experience movie making for themselves and that it’s not only the rich and famous that get the opportunity to make a movie, according to Porter (2004).

One particular and very important area of health and wellbeing we covered in class today was ‘Online Safety’, we discussed how to go about educating children about online safety and how important it is for our children to know what is wrong and how to report if something is wrong or unsafe, Beauchamp (2012) states that the best schools will not restrict children online but will educate children about online safety, the best schools will also help the children understand what is wrong and how to report it.  As part of our own awareness we carried out an online quiz with our class lecturer which we can share/discuss with children in the future and we were set a task as an assessment to create our own movie or trailer based on staying safe online.

The assessment was to be a group task, so we promptly started to plan our movie trailer and collected resources and props that we needed as we had a set time to complete the task.  The topic we decided to base our trailer on was ‘People are not who they sat they are’.  For this we followed similar story lines of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, where a young girl was in contact with her gran, believing that she was indeed speaking to her gran when really it was the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ which in our case was a character out to cause fear and upset, similar to the big bad wolf in the classical storybook.

I feel the movie trailer we created sends a clear message out about the importance of online safety.  The trailer was delivered in such a way that children can relate to the story line as they know the classic story and by using various semiotic systems we can ensure it reaches out to it’s viewers in various ways.  Also included at the end of the trailer, we gave useful details for viewers that wanted to seek further information or confidential assistance regarding online safety.

References

• ›Beauchamp, G. (2012) ICT in the Primary Classroom: From Pedagogy top Practice. Pearson.
• Education Scotland. (2004) Curriculum for Excellence; Experiences and Outcomes. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/scottish-education-system/policy-for-scottish-education/policy-drivers [Accessed: 13 February 2018].
• ›Porter, B. (2004) Digi Tales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories. Bernajean Porter Publication.
• ›The Scottish Government. (2015) Literature Review on the Impact of Digital Technology on Learning and Teaching. [Online] Available: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/24843/1/00489224.pdf [Accessed: 13 February 2018].