Using iMovie to Time Travel

Well, maybe you can't time travel, but as educators, we can bring students together who took our courses at different times. I am using iMovie this semester to do just that!

I teach AP US History, which is being reorganized by the College Board around several different themes for the next academic year. I will inevitably have to introduce these new themes to my students next year. The content is the same, but the categorization and organization is different so I thought, why don't I just let my very bright and capable students from this year make sense of and introduce these themes to my students from next year? Sounds like a logistical nightmare - parent permission forms, getting them out of their new classes, dealing with summer brain drain and forgetfulness - unless you involve some clever technology!

This task was facilitated by the presence of iPads in my classroom this semester - isn't being in a 1:1 classroom great! I gave my students a copy of the new curriculum, and assigned each group one of the themes outlined in the curriculum. My students made iMovies summarizing their assigned theme. They introduced the major concepts in the theme, and then found different examples that they could think of to explain the progression of this theme that they learned during the duration of their course. They then added visuals, pictures, videos, and voice narration to bring their explanation to life. By the time they are done, I will play the videos for their classmates - both this year's and next year's. This way, I can have my students from this year talk to next year's students without any organizational. 

Besides connecting two different years of students, this also benefit may current students. This gives my current students the additional skill of taking a body of information that they are familiar with and use their higher level thinking skills to reorganize it. This also allows them to utilize a technology tool, iMovie, that is novel to many of them, as well as producing work for a more authentic audience beyond the scope of their current classmates.