Submitted by:Tracy Bonday-deLeon
Collaborators: Katie Grootegoed
School: Douglas Freeman High School
Summary
C-SPAN’s StudentCam is an annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think seriously about issues that affect our communities and our nation. Students are asked to create a short (5-8 minute) video documentary on a topic related to the competition theme. Students used Movie Maker and created original videos incorporating a video from C-SPAN as well.
TIPC Ratings
Approaching: Students are required to view and evaluate C-span footage that helps to articulate and frame the policy discussion for their documentary. Utilizing this information they help to develop questions to pose to their interviews. The are bound by the guidelines from C-SPAN.
Ideal/Target: Students not only had to set-up appointments for interviews via e-mail and phone, but they also conducted interviews. This required members of their team schedule appointments, determine who would film, develop the questions, and have someone act as the interviewer to create the documentary.
Approaching: Teacher provided some suggestions on ways the group might be able to more effectively show involvement of the federal government in the local community. Students needed to edit interviews to make sure they were effectively addressing the competition question within a limited time frame. To enhance this lesson, the project could require that students provide a solution to an authentic problem.
Approaching: Students used original questions and interview footage and combined with existing news footage to show the impact of the federal government on their community. Each project showed the collaborative efforts of each team, with a division of task assignments. Students had to research the policy to be able to effectively communicate information and ask applicable questions of their interviewees, and they utilized music, graphics etc. to create an original work.
Student Artifact
