Starting our classroom blog

This is the first post of this year (I know, where have we been!) but so much pressure comes with hosting a blog!  I have decided to just go for it and stop worrying about it...something is better than nothing right? I am going to do some quick summaries of the projects we have accomplished so far this first half of the year in each grade level.  With that stated, I will blog about a different grade level every few days.  Today I will begin with 6th grade!  Let me start by stating that we are currently a one-to-one school in regards to technology.  Our students each have a chromebook and we as teachers have a mac.  This has been amazing but comes with a learning curve as most software we have used in the past are not loaded onto the chromebooks and/or macs....such as moviemaker.  I was not a huge fan of moviemaker but it did work for our stop motion films and we could add sound (most of the time...ha ha!)  This year I had to research and try many apps to see if they would do what I needed them to do for this stop motion animation we would be creating; in the end I settled on the stop motion animator app and iMovie for the sound and editing (more on this later.) Below are some pics of the students working on their stop motions, as well as some of the stop motion animation films themselves!

As you can see, each group had to write the storyline, create the characters out of air-dry clay, draw a background then take the photos in the stop motion app.  We have been (sadly) unsuccessful in getting the videos into iMovie since our school iPads must have something blocked not allowing us to add a prerecorded saved video into iMovie itself which is why the video samples below have no sound:(