In class we were instructed to come up with an assignment in which we were teachers giving our students 6 days in class to make a pilot episode of their own web show. We decided to make this an assignment for high school students in a concert band class, that stretches out through most of a semester that would be counted as a midterm or end of the year project. The 6 days given in class would be one day a week, for 6 weeks, to give students the time that they needed in and out of class to make this short video. I worked with my classmates Tanyon Berry, Freddy Ochoa, and Jesselyn Orpilla.
The assignment was to explore different types of music (nontraditional in the context of a band class) in the community, their choice of community, and to do an interview with someone that performs this music. The idea was that we would have already compiled a list of trustworthy people with other teachers that are doing the same project with their classes and the students would have the chance to choose who and what they wanted to explore. When this assignment was turned around and given to us, we had to figure out how to do this, because a lot of things are different when putting it into the context of this Digital/Hybrid Lab.
For our music, we decided to explore Taiko and interview someone that is in the Sun Devil Taiko club at ASU. So far we have developed a script and plan for shooting the actual show, and how we want to be able to edit the whole thing. The title of our “Webshow” is Listen Up! and we even have our own theme song, written by Tanyon, and a great plan for how we want to make this pilot episode really cool as one of our last projects of the semester that we get to share with everyone. We did the filming and planning in class, and I mostly did the editing on my own time because we were trying to figure out the sequence of everything and the background music for each part. The goal for this project was to do most of it in class, but we decided to make it just a little bit more in terms of the length and what we did with it, because it was our last big project. Tanyon and I were working on another project about the same time with another classmate, Stephanie Brennan, developing a learning playlist on how to make a music video with high quality sound, and were able to incorporate some of the things we were learning and used some of the audio from that in the end.
This “adventure” seemed really cool when we were given the hypothetical of our own classroom, but when we were told we had to do it I began to feel anxious because we didn’t think that we were going to have to do it ourselves. We were quickly able to come up with a solution, making adjustments to the plan when we had to and then working with what we had, but overall I think that we can actually make this a success. It is a little stressful, because there is some stuff that we have to do outside of the classroom, and this isn’t what we had planned for, but now I think that it is actually something that I could do with my students in the future, after I work out the details and make it more manageable for the future.
Andrea Henderson 