I have forever meant to write this blog post to share my experiences with WeVideo, but the school year ended and I floated away from everything. So overall the students were in groups and given a Middle Eastern country. They were given eight demographics and told to collect information on all countries. In the past students would make a travel brochure on a country, but this year they made a commercial about their county. They used WeVideo collaboratively, which worked out great for some groups, but others had a lot of issues with the videos not syncing. I think the site still has some work to do as it is still a new project Google is working on, but it is the only real internet based movie maker, so it worked. I gave the students a rubric to work with, which I thought was simple to follow. Here is a link to the Rubric. When students turned in their video they also had to reflect on their own work and grade themselves and their group and give reasons for the group. I always find that students are very hard on themselves. I give an optional comment box at the end where a lot of students said they worked hard and hoped I liked the video, that the assignment was hard, but they liked it, some told me that they really disliked the project because they are bad with computers, and so on.
Even if students dislike a project, I like that they are honest enough with me to say it. They know I will not take it personally and it will not effect their grade positively or negatively. I work hard to build that relationship with my students because I think it is important. One student's comment really hit me hard though,"There is no way anyone could legitimately get an A on this commercial, give the rubric, the time limit, and amount of knowledge on the computer. Terrible activity when not given enough time." I was shocked when I read this because 1. I had no idea the student felt this way 2. I completely disagreed with the student. I struggled with how to respond, but I knew I needed to. I wrote a long email that turned into me defending my decisions and thought that was not the best choice and maybe he was not the only one to feel this way, so the next class period I asked students if they were confused or scared by the rubric. It was a resounding yes! I realized that what I meant by he rubric was not being understood. I pulled up the rubric and we discussed section by section the meaning of everything. After that they told me they felt relieved. I went through this process with every class, including the one the student that brought this to my attention was in. He did not say anything to me or ask any questions, but I did not want to call him out, so at that point I let it go. I apologized to all the classes for any misunderstanding or undue stress that the rubric had caused. Now that they understood the grading better, they were excited to see their scores, and other students' videos!
I made a spreadsheet of all the videos, which can be found here. I made them into QR Codes and put them around campus like a scavenger hunt and the plan was to have students review each others' commercials, but there was so much traffic to them that the district cut access thinking that there was something inappropriate in the site. This was unfortunate, but students used their personal data plans to view commercials and got a buzz going on around campus about them, which was very exciting for me.
Sorry about the length of this post, but a lot happened in the two weeks we spent on this assignment that I thought needed to be shared. I will definitely do this activity again, but with all rubrics I will explain verbally what is meant and make sure everyone understands we are not shooting for TV ready the first time out of the gate.
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