Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)
I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).
The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.
It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.
Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.
This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.
I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).
Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.
2 Comments until now
Hi Chris,
Will have a proper read of the case study when I’m less busy, but skimming through looks interesting – thanks for sharing! Would you say Revelation Sight and Sound is worth the money? We use Photostory or Movie Maker at the mo, neither of which is perfect by any means.
We bought Sight and Sound in 2006 and it’s been our workhorse for dozens of different projects so it’s had more use than any other piece of software in the arsenal, so good value in that sense. Pretty inexpensive, as well.
It’s not perect. The lack of ripple editing is a pain in the backside when adding sounds and moving stuff around in the timeline. We’ve had to devise particular workflows to overcome this but I guess that’s the same for every bit of software.
It’s also not great on a network as it needs to write stuff to the C: drive. There are workarounds and patches available but it’s a headache.
Having said that, it’s a really good intro for younger kids to non-linear editing and it’s brilliant for all areas of the curriculum. We’ve done stuff with it for literacy, science, MFL, drama, media etc.
Always happy to let you have a play
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