Images Made Using “Star Wars Intro Creator”
Kathleen Marte, the English Language Development (ELD) Site Coordinator at Thousand Oaks Elementary, decided to try video projects as a way of providing structured practice with oral language in a fun and engaging way. In the past couple of weeks, Kathleen has experimented with Flipgrid (a website where students can record and watch each other’s short video responses to a prompt) with her fifth graders and creating videos using a green screen with her 4th graders.
This green screen project was serendipitous. I had been introduced to green screen at MERIT, an ed tech institute I attended this past summer, and had been hoping to have an opportunity to try it with students. As part of the Systematic ELD unit called “How’s the Weather?” Kathleen had shown her students an online weather report video project for inspiration. Fortunately our paths crossed and we enthusiastically carried out this project together.
Her 4th grade EL students wrote and rehearsed weather reports about a specific region: the Mojave Desert, the Monterey coast, the Berkeley Hills, and the mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe. I visited her class with my newly assembled green screen kit: an iPad with the Do Ink Green Screen app installed, a tripod for an iPad, and green fabric that I temporarily put up on a classroom wall.
When students came to class, they took turns searching for their background image on the internet and saving it to the iPad. Each student then learned how to set up their shot in the Do Ink program, record their presentation, review it, and try a second take. Each student presented confidently, conveying key information about their region’s weather and sharing advice for how to prepare for it.
Kathleen collected the videos in Google Drive and shared them with their classroom teachers and families. Our first attempt at recording videos with a green screen was a success!
Please see for yourself by watching this awesome sample weather report about Lake Tahoe.
Now my green screen kit is assembled and ready for action. Please reach out to me if you would like to explore how your students could create videos with a green screen.
– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA