Project Title: “If I were to run for President (of the school)…”

 

Author Information:

 

Angie Berna Milliren

Director of Secondary Choral Studies/Media Educator

Elizabeth Forward School District

1000 Weigles Hill Road

Elizabeth, PA 15037

abm0031@mix.wvu.edu

 

I hold a bachelor’s degree in music education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1998). In 2005, I graduated from California University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Multimedia Technologies. I have been teaching in public education for the past 22 years. I have been teaching “Multimedia Productions” since 2013. My students leave my program with a firm understanding of the Adobe Creative Suite, Apple iWorks Applications, and production techniques.

 

This unit is occurring at the beginning of the year and will follow the “Compilation” project where students gathered a personal themed collection of videos and learned to edit them into one succinct video using Adobe Premiere. The underlying technological gains are creating a promotional poster using Adobe Photoshop and a commercial using Adobe Premiere.

 

Introduction:

 

This lesson is intended to make students enrolled in “Multimedia Productions” aware of the current political climate while creating a video, graphic, and animation using the Adobe Creative Suite. The course is a small studio elective class that teaches video and audio production as well as website design. The productions are intended to integrate other curricular areas to create lessons that can be implemented within the core classes. There is a maximum enrollment of 10 per section. This unit integrates American Government, Social Studies/Sociology, Creative Writing, and Graphic Design Skills to create an advertising campaign that appeals to a target audience which the students define. Students will be charged with defining their own platform with regards to getting elected by a panel of their peers (this will also help the students to define their target audience and how to appeal to that audience).

 

This lesson will occur over several classes and culminate in a mock election of all students enrolled in the class. Each class member will place the completed portfolio on their websites and will be strongly encouraged to deploy their campaigns on social media platforms.

 

Technology Used:

 

• Software:

  • Adobe Premiere – Create a 30-second advertisement highlighting the platform

  • Adobe Photoshop – Create a logo and promotional posters for both print and digital deployment

  • Adobe Illustrator – (Optional) Create a vectorized logo

  • Canvas – District LMS for assignment collection

  • Creative Commons Search – Copy-free artwork for student designers

  • Lino.it – A shared brainstorming bulletin board for students

  • Social Media Platform – Optional deployment of campaign and voting venue

• Hardware:

  • iPad/iPhone/Mobile Phone – Capture video for advertisement

  • MacBook Pro – A lab of 20 computers is available for student use

  • TV/Apple TV – To view presentations for the class

 

Learning Objectives:

 

 Students will be able to:

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• Identify and describe the areas of interest for their target audience (fellow students).

• Analyze the preferred viewpoint of their audience.

• Design a campaign that they feel will appeal to their audience base.

• Create videos and print media that support their platform and campaign.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of their campaign after a social media election.

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The Lessons:

Lesson One

Lesson Two

Lesson Three

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Student Engagement:

 

• Behavioral Engagement: Students are attempting to persuade their peers into voting for them. As this course is an elective, students have opted to take part in a course that provides many opportunities for individual creativity. According to Fredricks “…Finn's (1989) definition of behavioral engagement. He divides participation into four levels, which range from responding to the teacher's directions to activities that require student initiatives, such as involvement in extracurricular activities and student government. The assumption is that participation at the upper levels indicates a qualitative difference in engagement in terms of a greater commitment to the institution.” (2004)

• Emotional Engagement: The students are interested in creating videography as they have signed up for the course. The attainment value is winning the election…which in turn also means the student waged the best campaign with the most catching media. I suspect several students will also compose jingles or produce other methods of media to communicate a campaign.

• Cognitive Engagement: Students are busy analyzing what most appeals to their peers and how they might be able to sway the vote in their favor. The production process required sequential reasoning to move from an idea to a storyboard, and from a storyboard to a finished product that adheres to the requirements.

 

Assessment:

 

The assessment of the project will follow a rubric and a checklist for the students. I generate a class rubric each year of what expectations the class has for the quality of media productions (photography, videography, scriptwriting, file management, deployment expectations). I firmly believe that students, when actively engaged in the conversation about what constitutes excellence versus what is mediocrity or, worse, failure, are more emotionally and behaviorally invested in the process of learning. There will also be a technical “checklist” that each production must adhere to that is provided by the teacher. The purpose of adhering to a checklist is that students are prepared to enter competitions in the future, each of which will have different requirements.

 

Standards:

 

The standards are written into each individual plan. The standards are written for the unit and listed adjacent to the “Student Learning Goals” in each plan.