Below is the profile and experience of a student who has completed my learning sequence. It provides an outline of their experience and offers insight on the impact of digital pedagogy on this student's learning. Not all activities and procedures are discussed, and some personal anecdotes are included.
My name is Ciara, I'm a Year 9 student in Mr Johnson's Media Arts class at a state high school in Mackay. I recently moved to Australia from Ireland, so I'm not entirely sure how the school system works, but I've always preferred arts classes so I'm kind of interested in Media Arts. I'm excited but nervous to make friends and hope I can keep getting good grades like I did at my last school.
This term in Media Arts we've been learning about how people get represented in the media, especially about how Australians are shown in news shows. I haven't seen the shows we talk about before, like The Project and A Current Affair, so I've been a bit confused about the class at times. Though the teacher does usually have a few ways of explaining what we're learning about, the extra PowerPoints Mr Johnson puts on our OneNote are usually pretty good.
The OneNote is really useful actually, as long as I have wifi on my laptop I can any class stuff from my laptop. We've just done a lot of editing and Mr Johnson provided all of the instructions on our OneNote, I think if he wasn't there that I would've been able to use the instructions to do the work all on my own. Though it was good to see him show how to use Premiere on the projector, and I think other students found the handout he made pretty helpful too.
We made a horror video using footage from a professional studio. I didn't finish the whole video though because I spent too much time messing around with the effects in Premiere, you can do lots of cool stuff! Before we did the horror video we also looked at other movies like the Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter to see how genre can be made I got to watch the Harry Potter one since I finished my other work early). Changing the genre is really funny, so when we did the editing I tried to make my video like a meme and use lots of crazy effects. Mr Johnson said that memes were kind of like a genre, but if the meme went for as long as movie it would probably be a comedy or experimental genre. I just wanted to do anyway, it whether it was an actual genre or not.
Making an online folio for our video was so good. I've got an instagram account but having actual website for myself isn't something I knew I could do. Mr Johnson said the folio was a place for us to show and share our media work, it reminds me of the folio books I've made in Visual Arts before. Setting up a site was easy, and I enjoyed looking at other people's sites and talking to them about it and their video. I've got to know the other students better when Mr Johnson does group things through OneNote, and lots of the class thought my meme video was funny, so I must have done a good job making meme effects.
I thought that making and sharing this video was good because it seemed professional and 'real-life'. Some students have actually got feedback from Framelines.tv after they emailed their video to them, I hope I get some back for mine. I think I'll keep using my website for other things than this class too, I can add as many pages as I want and I've got a few ideas.