Consider Me A Convert

For thirteen years now, I’ve ended the year in my 8^th grade English classes with a sprawling group project in which students work in groups of four or five to adapt a scene from Romeo and Juliet into film.

The project has steadily evolved as the available technology has evolved.  It has definitely gotten a lot easier; I have bittersweet memories of the early days when editing involved wiring two VCR’s together and pressing “play” on one machine and “record” on the other to get the desired clips into a crude sequence.  But today it feels like something fundamentally changed when one kid brought his iPhone 4 to class so his group could do a dry run of filming a scene.

 I’ve never before been able to offer the kind of formative feedback on student filming that I can with student writing—filming and editing being such a monumental task there was only time to do it once—but today we had a rough draft to work with. We were able to look at shot composition and blocking and make revisions by shooting again, all in a matter of minutes. In short order, they had worked through one key sequence and were ready to apply these lessons to the rest of their film. And by the end of the day I, had several groups using smart phones to quickly test and revise their ideas.

Count me as a convert to the idea that cell phones should be allowed in school.

About the Author: Clark Meyer (@clarkbeast) teaches English at Westminster. Good with ideas, not good at follow-through, works best in teams for that reason