After much nagging by my students, I’ve created a 6 lesson unit on how to create digital videos. My Y9 classes did the unit as a bit of light relief after the QCA online test!

To give the students some inspiration for their video I asked them to look for interesting articles on the BBC Newsround site. After choosing an appropriate story the students adapted the article to make it into a news script and found images to illustrate it.

Another aspect that I was keen to build into this unit was collaborative work. I divided each class into 5 teams. Each lesson started by me explaining the tasks that were to be done by the end of the lesson. The students in each team shared out the tasks and gradually combined their efforts during the course of the unit.

After having done some teacher training in digital video I decided to create finished videos by animating stills rather than using video footage. This made the process much quicker and simpler to manage.

The process started by creating a storyboard of images in PowerPoint. The presentation was then saved as .jpgs (see file type drop down menu in Save As window). The narration was recorded in Movie Maker as a .wma file. Finally all the seperate elements were imported into a Movie Maker Project to make the finished video.

To view an example video left click Global News or save it by right clicking and save target.