My Digital Classroom

Here are a couple of things I tried last week when teaching the importance and the role played by music in films.  What I first intended on doing was showing different scenes in the film where the music plays an important part. The problem with this approach is that the students can also use their knowledge of the film, as well as the character’s reactions to gauge the purpose of the music in the scene. I then hit upon the idea of using the cd soundtrack from the film which would isolate the music itself, eliminating the vision as well as the character’s voices. As the cd is difficult to acquire, I decided to go to amazon.com and use the samples of selected tracks from the soundtrack. The students then had to decide what the filmmaker was trying to achieve with each piece of music and the characteristics of the music.

Another activity I thought could work was getting different examples of recognisable music which are trying to elicit the same emotion in viewers. Then get the students to identify the similarities between each piece.

If other people have further ideas about teaching the music in films, I’d love to hear them.

Over the holidays, our school installed the updated version of the animation program, Kahootz. We had a great time using the program last year as part of our study of film as text. The students had to create a deleted scene from the film using Kahootz, taking into consideration things like camera angles and shot sizes. The characters had to look and act like their film counterparts, and at the end they had to present their scene to the class and explain why they used certain camera angles & shot sizes, and how the scene fits in to the film. The students had a great time and they were able to demonstrate their understanding of the film in a visual format.

The version we used last year (Kahootz 2) had its limitations in that there were limited settings, characters and sounds. However, this was also a good thing, as it forced the students to problem solve and work together to find solutions. This is what I’m a little worried about with the new version of Kahootz. I don’t know if we are going to see the same level of problem solving that occurred with last year’s students. Students will no longer have to try to alter the shape and colour of the one fish available in order for it to look like a clown fish or angel fish. In the new version, there are four or five different fish to choose from.

In Kahootz 3, there is a wider range of settings and objects/characters, and the students are able to record their own voices and lay down soundtracks. The program is a lot more powerful and easy to use, which will also reduce some of the frustrations felt by some of the students last year who hadn’t used the program before. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what they create this year. I’m sure I’ll be amazed again.