I want to showcase some work that one of our partnership schools has done with our help.

Tom Gardiner at Birley Community College in Sheffield finished this project this week. It’s part of a wider module on character archetypes and comparing Batman Begins with the 1960′s Batman movie. For this exercise a group of Y9′s storyboarded a trailer about a superhero character they had developed. With our help they Photoshopped themselves into various environments and then put the movies in a photostory with a soundtrack of their choice. 

It was an interesting group being all boys and being neither high or low achievers they rarely get a chance to do special activities. We did it over 2 stages, the first at the school taking the pictures and the second at our City Learning Centre completing the Photoshopping and then putting the photostory together using Logotron’s Revelation Sight and Sound. As a side note, their behaviour  was excellent despite being locked into one activity for a whole school day.

This is the example we used as inspiration to get the students thinking about what they could achieve technically. (I did it – I don’t mind if you think it’s crap!)

This is the work of 2 groups.

 I really wish there was a film called “I, Penguin”. Genius!

 

I think the real effectiveness of this project came not from the use of IT but because of the choice of group by Tom and the focus on the preparation and writing that happened before any student got near a computer or camera.

NOTE: All the images (apart from the students’ own) come from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I meant to give credit for them but neglected to keep the URL’s. My apologies to the owners. If the images are yours and you would like credit please leave a comment and I will amend the post.

The music was taken from the Audio Network Production Library (on schools’ broadband package.