Man of Iron: Silent Movie Presentations From Phase 3

Last term I began working with colleagues and students in phase three, as a member of the Integrated Curriculum Team.  The young people in phase three are vertically grouped 11-13 years old (y6 to 8) students, and Integrated Curriculum Sessions involve them in engaging with cross curricular themed activities, developed around the focussed teaching of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills.

During term 1 we worked primarily on a project based on The Man of Iron, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his legacy in the Bristol Area.  The Key focus areas were rooted in developing key skills for Independent Learning and Research as well as facilitating situations to promote Team Work and collaboration.  Throughout the term, students explored a number of aspects of Brunel, his life and his legacy, using material from Primary and Secondary sources.  The following are a pair of video outcomes created using Internet based collect and store processes, and our first attempts at using MovieMaker to prepare and share the outcomes of our work digitally. 


In class a number of table top activities were used to prepare and plan the presentations, before using ICTs.

• Inference squares were used to facilitate and support image based reading activities, and ground the raising of questions as starting points for research.
• Mindmapping was used to record and help link and group key ideas collected from a range of text sources, including books, internet based texts, images and the reading of videos.
• Timelines were used to chronologically order and sequence the major events in Brunel's life.
• Desk Top Timelines then formed the planning frame that supported image searches and helped sequence the basic story we wanted to tell using Movie Maker
• Images collected from the web were imported to MovieMaker and sequenced/ chronologically or grouped according to the preferred method of presentation.
• The original intention was to have students record a voice over, so our paper based timelines were developed to become "storyboards" with simple scripts to support this.

As the video creation process evolved we began to think about how we could create video presentations in a "victorian style."  Silent movies/Newsreel arose as a possible idea, and in MovieMaker the credit tools were used to add captioned splash screens between clips.  To give the clips that "olde worlde" feel an aged film effect was applied to many of the individual clips, and music added as a soundtrack.  The students had a great time, and these are just two from our collection.  Hope they provide a little inspiration :o)

Video Attribution: Thanks to George, Maisie, Oliver and Katie