CELEBRATIONS

= = =Baringhup Primary School recently won the Middle Years Primary section of the Loddon Mallee= == =Region LOTE STUDENT FILM FESTIVAL.The theme was 'New Worlds, the Universe - Yours to Discover'= = =

Sally Dilks or as she is known 'Bu Sally' and the ICT instructor Deirdre Palmer worked collaboratively over several months from the design stage of the integrated unit to the completed movie entry. Teachers Cathy and Bill McCallum have volunteered their time over the past several years to ensure that students at Baringhup have an understanting and strong committment to the environment through their comprehensive environment program. During this time Mr. and Mrs Mack have been working with the children monitoring and documenting the water in the Loddon River, growing vegetables, herbs and restoring native vegetation. Their practical and theoretical contribution to the project was vital as the students developed their storyline and script. To understand how a biosphere could sustain life the students carried out extensive research followed up with practical sessions in Environment Ed including the creation and monitoring of their own small biospheres.

The students learnt to play traditional Indonesian instruments, sing songs in Indonesian and narrate, translate and record their lines using Audacity. We had several technical problems one of which was lack of suitabl = = e recording hardware. The children were not satisfied with the quality of the recordings from the netbooks or the microphone headseats and after discussion amongst themselves they decided to use one of the students microphones from her Nintendo. Though this did improve the sound quality to a small degree it would be desirable for future projects to invest in a quality recording system or device.

The children used PhotoShop, Gimp and Paint NT to manipulate images, insert layers and add subtitles. The children had to research and download basic images which was difficult at times finding suitably sized and copyright free images. We solved this problem by scanning original images of Bali and Indonesia from private photo albums. The children used digital still and movie camera's to capture images of each other and the younger students in traditional Indonesian dress before downloading them into designated folders on the shared network. The need to name files and folders appropriately became apparent to the students as their image library grew. Images were included in the movie of papercraft animals and buildings that the students made and animations using 'Pivot' to show the building of space ships and biospheres on the moon and to show the harvesting of bamboo which was the sustainable construction material that they decided the Indonesians would grow on the moon and later on Earth for export. 'Sketchup' was utilised to design biospheres and spaceships

The animations were saved as gifs which enabled them to be inserted into Movie Maker along with video, stills, text frames and finally using the online program 'Wordle' the students designed the credits.

The students completed their tasks during the weekly two hour Indonesian lesson and during the specialist ICT classes both in school hours and in a weekly one hour afterschool ICT class.

The children were concerned that the judges may think that they had not done some of the work themselves and a decision was made that we would send the judges the finished movie accompanied by a trifold brochure explaining the process, storyline and students reflections. They were thrilled to have the brochure shown and discussed at the beginning of the Festival at Bendigo Cinema.

It has been an exciting project for the children, enabling them to work collaboratively, learn new skills and be publicly acknowledged for their excellence. But the truly exciting element of this project has been the affect on staff. As specialists who work in multiple schools it is not always an easy task to find time to consult and investigate possible collaborative projects. Through sheer determination, ICT and of course the telephone we broke this barrier and began exchanging ideas and skills, gaining strength as our shared vision began to formulate. We had one hour in-house staff PD per week in which I was able to teach Bu Sally many of the ICT skills she needed for the project as well as working on some of the technical and planning aspects of the project together. On a professional and personal level we have formed a strong bond and have the satisfaction of knowing that collaboration is not only an incredibly strong tool for student learning and personal and professional growth but is also a lot of funl. What's our next project well lets just say it will be exciting and this time we are looking at going beyond the classroom walls and collaborating with more schools, more staff and more volunteers. Excited .......well we are!