Fifth graders at Trevvett Elementary have been studying the ocean (SOL5.6), so today students in Ms. Adamonis’ class created green screen videos about the ocean. A green screen allows you to place a different image behind the speaker, making it look like the speaker is standing in or near the ocean, for example. It was a challenge finding a free web tool for making green screen videos (if you know of any, please let us know in the comments). There are several mobile apps that can do it, and Mac computers can do it with Photo Booth (see a similar lesson taught using Photo Booth here), but we needed something we could use on our Dell laptops. Finally I found this, which seemed to work pretty well. Our next challenge was making the green screen background. We used colored plastic tablecloths, but it’s actually better if you have something more permanent and smooth, like a solid colored wall or bulletin board. In order to use this webtool, you need to activate your webcam by following the prompts, then you click on the background and adjust the sliders at the bottom until it looks good (adequate lighting helps a lot). We used Screencastify to record our videos. Screencastify saves the videos to your Google drive, making it easy to share the links. You can see a couple of student examples here.
