Connecting Through Video - Stories of People Helping Communities

This morning I had a Skype conversation with Rushton Hurley about his non-profit's, Next Vista for Learning, latest projects. One of those projects is Connecting Through Video. The Connecting Through Video Project is an attempt to gather videos made by students that tell the stories of their communities. The idea is to create videos that feature the good works of people and organizations in your community.

Below is a video from the Connecting Through Video Project.


The project is sponsored in part by the Rotary eClub of the Southwest USA, but students don't have to have a connection to a Rotary Club to participate. These are Rushton's words about the project: We're trying to get videos by students telling about their communities and about people who help others.  Don't worry if you don't have a connection to a Rotary club, just let me know, and I'll help you out. 


Applications for Education
One of the things that Rushton and I talked about when he told me about the Connecting Through Video Project was my school district's requirement that every student has to do some type of community service project before graduating from high school. Creating a short promotional video for a local charitable organization could be one way to do a service for the community. Upload the finished video to Next Vista (the video could also be uploaded to YouTube) to help spread the word about that charity. Or as Rushton said much more succinctly than I just did, Community service requirement - help a charity tell its story!

Video Project Idea - Get to Know Your School

One of the challenges of large schools, especially large high schools, is getting to know the people in the building and what is happening in the building. I was thinking about this over the weekend when I got the idea for a student video project. The idea is this, have students create "this is our school" videos that can be displayed on your school's website.

Here are some video project ideas:

• Profiles of teachers. Expand the profile beyond, "what do you teach?" and focus on the teacher's interests, hobbies, or "secret talents."
• Profiles of students.
• Profiles of lesser-known extracurricular clubs.
• Profiles of secretaries, custodial staff, cafeteria staff. Don't forget, they're very important in keeping a school running smoothly. 

Here are some free tools for creating videos:

• WeVideo is a collaborative online video creation tool. In the video editor you can upload your own media clips or use stock media clips to produce your video. The video editor provides tools for trimming the length of display and or sound of each element you add to your video project. What makes WeVideo collaborative is that you can invite other people to create and edit with you. WeVideo offers four different user plans.

• Myna is a free web-based audio track mixer created by Aviary. Using Myna you can mix together up to ten tracks to create your own audio files. The sounds you mix can come from the Myna library, your vocal recordings made with Myna's recorder, or audio tracks that you upload to your Myna account. 

• Roc, which is similar to Aviary's Myna audio editor, is a cloud-based tool for mixing sounds. Completed Roc projects can be downloaded for use in podcasts, videos, and other multimedia projects. Roc can also be integrated into your Google Apps account through the Google Apps Marketplace.

• You might want to arrange a series of videos about your school. Perhaps linking them together in sequence in a choose-your-own adventure style. If so, check out this post for directions on how to do that.