CEP 800 - Lesson Plan Implementation Reflection

Lesson Reflection

CEP 800

Spring 2013

Description:

My lesson was designed for high school students in the first trimester of Spanish 2.  In this lesson, students learned how to use Movie Maker in order to produce a commercial to market a tour to the Spanish-speaking country of their choice. This lesson was designed to be a small part of a larger project.  

Narrative:

I have only three students in the first trimester of Spanish 2.  I started the lesson by showing the students an example of what a finished commercial could look like.   We then created a movie on Movie Maker together as a class.  The students helped choose photos, music, and created a narration as I walked them through the creation of a Movie Maker project.

During the creation of our class movie, we discussed different reasons why we should respect copyrights that individuals have placed on their work.  When I gave the students time to explore Creative Commons, we ran into some minor problems as the site was blocked by our school’s sonic wall for the student accounts.  I had to log each student onto the school’s network using my username and password, something I wouldn’t necessarily do with a larger group of students.  

My students quickly grasped the idea of how to use Movie Maker.  In fact, it took much less time than I had anticipated.  However, it took them much longer than I had anticipated to choose the sites of interest in their countries and write the commercial script.   In fact, though all of my students have adequately learned the functions of Movie Maker, they have still not started to create their commercials as they are still working on developing their scripts.  The pictures and the music that they choose will be based on the script they write, so the project really hinges on developing a good script first.

Reflection:

I designed this lesson to enhance the existing curriculum.  Though there are many opportunities for students to receive snapshots of different Hispanic cultures throughout the school year, I wanted my students to have an opportunity to become even more familiar with a country of their choosing.  Since I have only a few students, I was able to mentor each student as he or she worked on the project and monitor their progress each day.  Although none of my students have used Movie Maker before, the program is fairly self-explanatory for students with basic computer knowledge.  Though their projects are not yet finished, I do not anticipate that they will have major problems with Movie Maker.  However, finding and properly using royalty-free pictures and music may be more of a challenge as most students are accustomed to using copyrighted music and photos without any consequences.  

I don’t think the Movie Maker program was absolutely necessary to achieve my objectives.   However, I think that by creating commercials using Movie Maker the students can produce projects that demonstrate their knowledge of the countries they choose and their ability to use specific Spanish vocabulary, while at the same time allowing them to apply the principles of digital citizenship that they learned in the lesson.  Hopefully by “doing,” the students will be able to remember these things much better.  

It has been interesting to see the projects start to come together.  The students seem excited about what they are able to produce using Movie Maker and other technology for other parts of the project.  I am looking forward to seeing the finished products.