Michele shares a low-tech but highly personalized version of MovieTalk:
Here is a twist on MovieTalk. First, my classes read some simple Russian anecdotes/short stories together. Then small groups make a storyboard of a story with plans to make short wordless videos. I tell them that the video-making has to take less than fifteen minutes, once in the lab, because I don’t like it when bells and whistles take away from input time.
Each group has at least one student who knows iMovie. The kids choose different ways of getting the movies made, but since they have to plan the shots and (minimal) props in advance, they can get it done quickly. They can just use the built-in cameras on our lab computers. I ask them to try to make the action slow enough so that I can talk all the way through.
The first story is about a kid packing to go vacation with friends on a river shore. He takes what he thinks he needs, but when his mom says he has to take his toothbrush, he decides he doesn’t want to go after all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5404FyfxLQ
The second story is about a girl who goes to buy gloves. A salesman tells her that the pair of brown gloves she wants costs a kiss. She tells him that’s fine. She’ll take three pairs, and her grandmother will come pay for them later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai3TDewC4so
I just MovieTalk the stories. The kids love watching their classmates, and they love retelling the story. They don’t care that there isn’t much in the way of high-tech editing.
Now I’m going to be able to use these stories over and over, but there’s not so much work in them that I’ll feel bad if we don’t use them more than a week or so. Without requiring sound, it’s easy to have a bunch of kids making videos in the same room. If there are any techie kids out there, they might be inspired to make better videos on their own.
Q. Did you have target vocabulary? I am wondering what guidelines you used besides the 15-minutes in the lab? This sounds like an idea I would love to do with all levels!
A. I use whatever vocabulary I want to when I show these. The kids have seen some target vocabulary before in the reading of the anecdotes since we read them in advance. All I have to do is tell versions of those stories and folk tales in class in Russian that is appropriate to the level of the kids. With time, we can get to reading the real things, or watching videos of the tales that are produced by Russians, but they’ll have a knowledge basis for them. Otherwise, I tend to push kids too hard into culture that they’re not yet ready to absorb.
The students’ versions of the story have to follow the story unless they have a really good reason not to. Figuring out what scenes they need to show in the story requires very close reading of the stories that they have already read a few times.
They have to be done with this project with time to export it from iMovie and load it onto a thumb drive or they won’t get credit. (Exporting to Quick Time takes the least time of the options on iMovie.)