Day 20
How do you curate student work – or help them do it themselves?
I curate, the students curate, it's a pretty even mix.
Their work is usually in the form of .mov files, which are so handy to upload to our school's YouTube channel!
The YouTube channel has gotten too cluttered, and the ads started to become too distracting, so we just recently switched over to Vimeo accounts for each class and division.
I also ask students to present their work at middle school assembly. I secure a block of time (about 15-20 min), and each filmmaking team presents their movie by talking about the assignment and their goals for the piece. It's kind of a big deal to stand up in front of all of your peers and share the movie you made. This is what my students look forward to most.
I select what I consider to be exemplary films and include links to them on a Hall of Fame list that I introduce to each new set of kids on the school's LMS.
Students submit their own work to youth film festivals for which they're eligible. Sometimes, a team produces a film explicitly for a film contest, which may result in a festival screening.
Every year I curate a school wide film festival that collects a sampling of the best work produced across my school's many grades.
Each filmmaking team creates a movie poster for their project, and these posters are hung up on the walls of my classroom. Each team then uses the mobile app Aurasma to turn the poster into a trigger (like a QR code) that loads the film onto the viewer's mobile device.
Every day these teams create fascinating work. We all share an Instagram account called cgsmediaarts and work together to capture the tiny flares of brilliance from our work-in-progress.
Students also exhibit their own work on their middle school blog. Established in 6th grade, each student uses his or her own blog as a portfolio of sorts, in every class, through to the end of 8th grade. In my class, they use it for exhibition, as an archive, and for formative & summative assessment.
