End of Year Project - Some Ideas & Lots of Questions

In the past, the computer teacher has handed out awards of some kind to each of our graduating 8th graders at a graduation breakfast. This is my first year teaching computers at the school and rather handing out awards, I would like to put on some kind of presentation made by the 8th grade class for their parents & teachers.

I'm kicking around the idea of having them create a slideshow or video of some kind but am confused as to what technology to actually use. I want the kids to take pictures of things that they'll always remember about the school and pictures with the teachers they've had and include their class pictures from each year and their graduation picture and to have them add their thoughts about the school and their memories of their teachers and classes to the pictures somehow. I would then like to be able to burn this to a DVD for each of the students and to show at the breakfast.

We have old (8 years or more) Windows XP machines in the computer lab with minimal disk space available (less than 2GB available on any given machine) and older monitors with not the greatest graphics cards and only 256MB of memory so I'm pretty sure Windows Movie Maker won't work for us. I thought about maybe using Photo Story since that requires less system resources than Movie Maker though I'm sure it won't run well on the machines we have due to the low amount of memory in the machines.

The more I have thought about it the more I am now leaning toward using VoiceThread so that I can have access at home and with the download ability I can burn the end result to DVD. We don't have any way of showing computer files on a big screen but we do have a large TV with a DVD player so I will need a DVD to show at the breakfast. VoiceThread will also let the kids share the VoiceThread with relatives that don't live in the area. In your opinion, does this sound like a feasible option?

We don't currently have any microphones but I can purchase (or have purchased) these. Should I have microphones for every student?

We also don't have any photo editing software on the computers in the lab and no money to buy any and as mentioned before not much disk space. So, any recommendations on the best online photo editors?

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions you can offer!

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Permalink Reply by Jason de Nys on April 14, 2008 at 7:00am

Voicethread could work really well. Don't forget that you can upload video as well as still photos. You will need to decide how many images each student can contribute and how and where comments can be made. That is probably best negotiated with the class.

It has been done to death but a really good PowerPoint can be quite poignant if you have the right backing music

I haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet but Jahshaka is an open source video editing and effects program. All the bells and whistles but complicated to boot. Might be a little too much.

Windows Movie Maker should work fine on your machines. Just slowish; it recommends 2Gb of free disk space and 256 MB of memory so you might be alright.

Hope that helps

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Permalink Reply by Vicky S on April 14, 2008 at 10:11am

I thought about using PowerPoint but we've done a lot of that already this year and was looking for something new for the kids to play with along with accomplishing the goal of creating the presentation.

I'll look at Windows Movie Maker again but since I often have less than 2GB of free disk space I'm still thinking this probably won't be the best alternative.

One advantage that I felt PowerPoint or Voice Thread would have is the ability that they could all work at the same time. With PowerPoint I'd have them do their individual portion and then combine them and with Voice Thread they could be commenting on different slides at the same time or adding slides as others commented, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Vicky S on April 14, 2008 at 11:43pm

Since the idea is to show this during the breakfast and then give it to the kids as a keepsake I don't know if a web site would work. It's hard to believe but there is at least one of the kids that doesn't have a computer at home and we don't have any way to project something from a computer onto a screen at the breakfast. No computers in the room for one thing and no projectors or anything even if there were.

I'll definitely check out the links your provided - some of this looks fun, if not for this project, then maybe for something else.

Thanks!