A New Experience with Storyboards

As the year ends, I am re-posting my five most popular 2011 musings.  This one was ranked #1 in page views, so I am quite pleased to reshare it.  It was inspired by my favorite assignment from last school  year.


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I've gone head with my plan to assign pairs of my 10th grade American Government students the task of creating a one minute political commercial for a real person of note in our state who is not presently a political figure. Here's the assignment:

Campaign Ad Project

As you can see, I have not emphasized the production values of the video.  In fact, the video concept will "count" for as much as the the actual solution.  Here's the catch--  I have never taught the skill before.  Fortunately,  I found the following video:





One of the resources included with the video is a template for actually completing a storyboard.  At first glance I judged the template to be more detailed than needed for this assignment.  But as it turned out those details helped smany students develop very tight plans. Here's a link to the storyboard template:

Storyboard Template

I was pleased with most of the plans.  There were some obvious gaffes, such as no plan to mention that the person featured was seeking political office!  So I was able to head these off at the pass.  More significantly, I could offer feedback about visual story telling and plans for shots which might present too much difficulty (or violate trademarks).

Hopefully I will be able to publish some sample ads, soon! 

Snow Day + Facebook + Health Challenge= Eureka!

I received the call regarding our snow day the night before.  Pretty sweet-- I could sleep in a bit and plan out a leisurely day.  I'm not sure why, but I found myself musing about the stir of inter-disciplinary activities I was entertaining for my American Government class.  One of them, I have been contemplating for launch as early as April, 2011.  It's the notion of having student create political ads as a way of showing their understanding of media and politics.

The idea actually came to me from Health Class.  In one of our professional cluster group's we have been working on a CBL related to teaching the influence of media on health issues.  Mike Gruber made (at least in my opinion), a terrific suggestion for a challenge:  Use media to "counterattack"  negative media influence.

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure that this challenge is going to come off this way.  But it sent me in a different direction. I intend to assign the students to make campaign ads.  The instructional goal will be the same-- By using media, the students will understand its influence.  We will study some ads and then give the students' their mission.

All of this was in my head, the morning of snow day.  I even had the notion that I would have them develop two ads-- one attacking an actual office holder and the other promoting the fictional campaign of the challenge.  Yet, I also wanted this fictional campaign rooted in reality.  I was thinking of having the students "run" an actual person against the officeholder.  However, when I started to write down potential "candidates" the list was pretty short.

Enter Facebook.  I posted the following status on my wall:

Help me out? I am trying to think of famous living Michiganders for whom my students can design political campaigns. The catch? They can't be politicians. Folks like Dan Gilbert, Jeff Daniels, Mary Sue Coleman. Toss in a name and I bet my minions have designed a campaign ad for her/him by May.

Lots and lots of names.  Enough to assure me that I can let teams of maybe  2-3 students draw and then run their candidate for governor or senator.  Perhaps in the future I could try this at a higher technical level by teaming with another department.  In the mean time, I am quite pleased with my Snow Day/Facebook/Health Challenge collaboration.

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Flickr CC Photo by EtanSivad