Creating a Vietnam Wall memorial

At our campus, we just finished a large photostory/movie project with our junior classes. Students were reading The Things They Carried, and were given a name from the Vietnam Wall. Each student researched what they could about the soldier's life or service in Vietnam, and with the help of our campus tech coordinator and myself(librarian) created a photostory, moviemaker or iMovie about the soldier.

The videos are available for viewing and I also wrote about the process here.
http://futura.edublogs.org/2007/05/14/the-things-we-carry-forward/

We'd be interested in feedback or comments!

There were a lot of challenges involved in getting this many projects completed(over 300 at once) and online. We were particularly trying to work with students on the idea of audience and that these videos would be on the web as a memorial that family members could eventually visit.

We learned some things about how to do this effectively next year,

Input is appreciated!

Tags: photostory, videoprojects

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on May 16, 2007 at 3:14pm

It sounds like a very cool project. If I read your account right, you did this using PBWiki. That means that everyone could edit their own material and post it on their own. Wouldn't that mean the technical part of the project was relatively simple, or did I misread you?

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Permalink Reply by Carolyn Foote on May 16, 2007 at 4:35pm

The issue was that the free part of pbwiki won't host that many files. Even the paid accounts don't really have enough space for that many projects, although we considered setting up a different wiki site for each teacher, and then linking to them from our main site.

We were originally going to "point" to their files on our server from links on the wiki, but at the end our tech coordinator decided to build a web page and link to their files from there, which was fine.

What took time was just because of network storage issues at our campus in terms of storing that many photostory/movie files--to get technical, we were out of server space, and a new server room was being constructed, etc. so we had to wait awhile for the space to be available before we could finalize the project.

This was one of those projects where I believed we could solve the problems along the way, so we went ahead and embarked on it, kept the network folks informed, and they worked with us to create space--it just took a while to get all the pieces in place, so we just had to "keep the faith" in the meantime.

(I do think it helps on big projects like this in a small district to keep people apprised of what you are doing so that you can get whatever support is needed along the way.)

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Permalink Reply by Ginger Lewman on May 18, 2007 at 6:45pm

I'm SO glad you shared this! What a way to have this page of history come alive for students. I wonder if we could do something similar for those fallen soldiers in Iraq right now? Talk about the war issue hitting home.

Thank you for sharing your insight!

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Permalink Reply by Rebecca on December 16, 2008 at 6:44pm

Hi Carolyn,

I'm finding PhotoStory works really well as a stimulus for writing - really useful for ESL adult students. I'm looking for ideas and pedagogy around using PhotoStory for students with learning difficulties, who may have very limited keyboard and computing experience as well as very limited English. It's a hard one - to keep the explanations simple but to devise activities so that students can feel they are in control of their learning.

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Permalink Reply by PeteeDunham on December 27, 2008 at 2:06am

*Applause*
awesum thought n well executed ....cheers mate :)

Hope you gonna do this stuff even betta next year .
Best Of Luck tae ye :)

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