Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been studying animal life cycles (SOL3.8b), so today students in Ms. Haley’s class researched an animal life cycle of their choice and created a video about it. I asked them to pick an animal they were curious about. To help spark their curiosity, I asked questions like: Do sharks lay eggs? What does a baby firefly look like? Do jellyfish go through metamorphosis? Once they had their ideas I gave them a few minutes to research online. We discussed reliable and unreliable websites: encyclopedias, museums, and science websites would be reliable, whereas a personal website or blog would be less reliable. I also explained how to tell the difference between real photos and fake photos. A real photo will have several examples that look similar. For example we did a search for “jellyfish eggs” (they don’t lay eggs) and found an image of a fried egg jellyfish (which isn’t quite what we were looking for, but it’s an actual thing). A better search phrase would be “life cycle of a jellyfish” (we discovered that its life cycle is quite complicated). After the students gathered their facts and photos, we logged into WeVideo with their Google accounts. We switched to Storyboard mode, which is simpler, by clicking the three lines at the top left. I demonstrated how to import their photos with the green cloud icon, and we changed the title of our video. Next, the students recorded an introduction using the webcam feature. We dragged our photos from the media folder down into the timeline and recorded a voiceover. Finally we selected a theme with music, turned down the volume of the music so it didn’t drown out our voiceovers, and published our videos. You can see them all here.
