I had recently gone home and was looking over some family videos when I ran across some skits I perform with my siblings for fun. It hit me, kids love being in front of a camera. I knew that the class was already used to performing skits in from of the class, so I thought it would be perfect to use a flip video camera to record the students’ skits. This way they could be more creative, incorporate everyone in the group, and redo parts when they messed up. Although the students were already used to performing skits, being recorded by the flip would be a new experience for them.
I was starting my first unit on the Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage Movements when I started to think about this assignment. I knew that I was going to teach the students on the use of propaganda during the Women’s Suffrage Movement, so I thought it would be a perfect idea to incorporate using the flip camera during this lesson. I decided to have the students create “commercials” that could have run during the time of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Before doing this they would have already learned and taken notes on the topic, so they would have all the required information at their fingertips. I broke the students up into groups (by randomly pulling note cards with their names on it) and explained to them exactly what they needed to do. I told them that during these commercials they needed to come up with a slogan, reference a famous suffragist, reference a conference, and include the rights the women were fighting for. The results I got were pretty awesome, and they were all quite different. Some of them had a bit of comedy added to it while others were on a more dramatic level. As we watched these videos as a class and talked about them, I saw their value as a review tool.
I decided to use the flip again after seeing the success in student involvement and getting them to connect to the concepts. We were halfway through the Civil War unit when another chance of using the flip presented itself. The students had just learned about the differences (cultural, economic, and political) between the North and South during the Civil War. I decided to break the students up into groups and assign them to be either Republican or Democrat. Each group had to state their political ideology, economic benefits of their region, cultural identity of their region, and include a slogan they created. It served as the perfect review tool. It took the information the students had been learning about in multiple lessons and pulled it all together. The one thing I did differently was that while the students were watching the videos they had to fill out a chart listing the mandatory elements each group was supposed to include.
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