
The Documentary
Original idea submitted by Linda Shore
If equipment is available, students can make short videos of their
visit to the museum. These videos can be used as an assessment on how
well they interact and understand the concepts contained within an
exhibit. These short videos can also be shown to fellow classmates
upon their return to school.
Students like watching peers, friends and themselves on TV.
Knowing they will be seen, makes them very conscious of how they
present themselves, this also helps push them into making a higher
quality product.
There a numerous approaches to this type of assignment, but
whatever approach is undertaken, the teacher should stress these
three points:
- Students need to understand their chosen exhibits.
- Students should understand the interrelationship of
exhibits.
- Students should be creative when producing their videos.
Here's one way of working this type of assignment:
- Break students into teams or groups of 3 or 4 students.
- Each team should be assigned an exhibit theme, such as heat,
magnetism or vision
- Students should locate 2 or 3 exhibits that fall within this
theme.
- They should play with and understand the dynamics and concepts
of their chosen exhibits.
- Next, they should decide how they want to present their chosen
exhibits so that fellow students watching a video of them will
appreciate and understand this exhibit theme. To help achieve
their goal, they should outline or write a script to orchestrate
their documentary. Each exhibit presentation shouldn't be longer
than a few minutes.
- Student tasks should be assigned. The group will need a
presenter or two, a director or organizer and a cameraperson.
These roles can be exchanged during filming.
- When the group completes their video documentation, students can edit their
feature in the Exploratorium learning studio or back at their school.
- Following their field trip, the students should be allowed to view each
other's work.
To view some examples of
student produced videos, click here.