My 7th grade life science students are shooting a nature documentary about the fields and wooded areas on our school’s property. Not a very exciting place. No massive vistas, no deep forests, and not real scenery. Until one looks closer. Then a whole world begins to emerge. My students have shot plants, insects, mammals, birds, and trees. The point of this project is to completely immerse them into this natural landscape and see our local ecosystem up close and detailed. I am using this method to teach the science curriculum. This project demands careful observation, research, and comparison.
The digital video footage and photographs they are beginning to create are quite good. Many of the students seem to have the ‘eye’ for composition. This is a very good thing. The flip side of this is that the students are beginning to amass a large amount of digital footage. And our school’s network does not have the space to store all this digital information. This was a problem I did not think about when I launched in this direction. But now I need to place the footage some place as their camera cards begin to get full.
Enter Dropbox. This is an online digital storage site that will allow the students to store their raw footage. Opening an account is easy, and the best part is they can also access their footage from home. Drop Box offers 2Gb of free storage. This is not a lot, but it should do the job as far as storing the images my students are capturing. The only alternative was to purchase a couple of external hard drives, but our school is strapped for funds this year. Drop Box seems to solve the problem.
I am new to Drop Box, so I am still on the learning curve. So far it does not seem overly intuitive, and I’m not quite sure of its filing system, yet. I have to work with it some more. Also, I test loaded some of my own footage and it seemed to take a long time. Large image files will require some time to upload. You can read two reviews at PC World Drop Box review and No 1 Reviews DropBox.com.
My next step is to get the parents on board and create Drop Box accounts from home. I will collect user names and passwords so team members always have access to one another’s footage. I’m not quite sure how to navigate this aspect of it with the parents without feeling like privacy issues are being compromised.
My entire approach is so new to my school and to our district, I’m literally writing the curriculum as I go. But I am convinced this technological immersion will pay off. My students will become informed authors of science media rather than passive spectators.
Bruce,
ReplyDeleteYour class video project sounds really interesting. I am a pretty visual person and I think I would have got a lot out of this kind of exercise as a 7th grader. It's nice that you took something like AV production, that seems to interest you, and science and mixed them up to create a really meaningful experience for the kids. I was looking around for some online storage sites myself and came across http://www.adrive.com/plans....it might be worth checking out.
Good luck with your project, I would like to see the final video.
Annie Woodle
Bruce,
ReplyDeleteI would be very interested in seeing some of the results of your student's projects. I can tell you that I have used Dropbox myself to move files from various locations when there was no other easy way to do it and for backing up some important files. It does work well for these items. One of the other sites that my school uses is Google Apps. With the educational version of Google Apps, all students get access to upload any type of file.
Good luck on your way!