In this week’s session we are focusing on movie-making. When I first looked at this, I was dreading it as I cannot keep a straight face when on camera. I am quite a confident person but as soon a s a camera turns to me it’s like I turn into a shy child hiding behind mummy. However, we were put into groups which put my mind at ease – a little bit.
For this session we were to create a short film about keeping safe online.
In this fast-paced world, almost everyone keeps in touch through social media. This ranges from very young to very old. With more and more social media platforms becoming popular it is hard to keep everything secure. This is when people can take advantage of vulnerable people. This is why as a teacher it is important to stop our pupils from making themselves vulnerable online (Beauchamp, 2012). A new form of social media called “snapchat” has become very popular with young people. My group and I decided to focus on this as there are some security concerns about this app.
After spending some time talking about and researching, we decide to focus on the upper primary school years as “From 11-12 children start to explore and take risks online but they haven’t yet developed the skills to recognise danger or the resilience against things that might upset them.” ((Munro, 2011).
We decided that we would film two of the group members talking about getting “snapchat”, with one wanting to get it and one being the voice of reason and pointing out the dangers of the app. The one who wants it gets it and begins talking to someone who she thinks is one-year older than her. However, it is actually a man who is much older. The man then asks to meet her and after a while of hesitation, decides to meet him. They meet in a graveyard and she eventually got in his car and that’s when it ends.
This may be hard hitting, however as a group we felt that to deter young people from doing the same it had to be.
During filming, we tried to make sure that we all got equal screen time, filmed some of it and made up some lines. This ensured that the group worked well together. We all found this task fun to do and very rewarding to be a part of.
After filming everything we had to then edit it into a movie using “iMovie”. This was an easy process that was quite self-explanatory. We all took turns to edit the short clips together to make our short movie. In iMovie we could create texts and add sounds to reflect the mood at different points in the movie. This helped to add to the suspense of the movie.
Overall, everyone in the group found it very rewarding to see our movie after putting in quite a bit of work. The whole process was enjoyable and would definitely be a task I would implement in a classroom. I know that the pupil would love using “iMovie” and would be able to create their own short films which would be rewarding for them.
References:
Munro, E.R. (2011) The protection of children online: a brief scoping review to identify vulnerable groups (PDF). [London]: Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre.
Beauchamp, G. (2012) ICT in the Primary School: From Pedagogy to Practice. Pearson.
