Task 5: Narrated Slideshows and Fair Use

 This project was difficult because of its imposed simplicity- keeping the story to less than 250 words was very hard! In order for it to still sounds natural, I cut the written version down to 240 words so I could still throw in natural phrasing while I was reading aloud. When I was writing the story, I drew a lot of inspiration from Storycorps’ projects, which I’ve listened to before and enjoy immensely. I tried to mimic the way they make the narrator personable right away. As for the pictures, I chose pictures from my own collection (all the ones I had from the trip of the group and Mr. Lewis) along with some pictures highlighting Lewis’ incredible role in the fight for civil rights: his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, him leading a group in the march to Selma. I wanted to make sure the audience knew his important role in that history. I enjoyed the beautiful images of the photobus projects. Those pictures truly tell a story without saying a word. I don’t think my project goes into depth as much as those do, but hopefully the pictures are still very interesting and provide important background information. I chose this music because I wanted the project to be lighthearted and enjoyable.

I enjoyed putting this project together because it involved reliving a great experience in my life. I was very invested in telling this story. The only frustrations were with technology- importing pictures, exporting the video with the right file type, creating audio tracks- the same things that have befallen me before. It took a few tries, but eventually I figured out how to get everything together in one place. I am just building my expertise, one frustrating technology block at a time.

I also chose not to share the project on youtube because I want to keep videos and images of my students off youtube as much as I can, especially because I can’t ask them if it’s ok for me to put them up (KIPP doesn’t have a blanket media release form, and even if they did, I don’t think I’d be covered by it). Even though Blogger is a public website, it’s much less likely they’ll be easily seen than if the video was on youtube. In my gut, it just seems like the right thing to do.

I think this would be an interesting project to do with students either as a presentation of a past experience or as a new assignment. What I mean by this is I could assign the students to tell a story from their lives and illustrate it with pictures (this would be ideal for a media studies class for students at any age) or, maybe for an activism, storytelling or journalism unit, sending students out to take pictures of something in their community and telling that story, similar to the photobus projects. This could build on several skills for students. Not only will it build media literacy through experience with recording and editing tools, but it exercises critical thinking, builds writing skills and seriously hones editing skills. Keeping a story concise is trickier than it seems, but teaches the students that less is more. I think some activities that would help scaffold this assignment would be writing the story before recording and creating a storyboard. I also think it would help students to listen to Storycorps and research famous photo essays (this would be especially useful in an activism unit).

Overall, the readings and videos from this week were incredibly illuminating. I had never heard of “Fair use” before. It turns out that it’s a useful concept for educators across all subjects. Although it’s true we are too litigious as a society, apparently teachers are protected when they use copywritten media resources, as long as they follow the loose guidelines of fair use. What I look away from the guidelines was: use media appropriately and cite when you can. I’m now going to be aware of this as a teacher. I think it made me more confident in using media as the helpful resource it was meant to be. However, some things remain foggy: for one, I didn’t find a universal guide to citing images. And for public domain images- do you not need to cite them? My feeling is no, but I want to be sure. These readings and videos gave me a good base of knowledge about fair use and copyright laws as a teacher, which was undeniably useful. But I also have many unanswered questions, some of which I hope will be answered by peers’ reflection posts.