Green Screens—A Way for Students to Share Their Knowledge

Green Screens—A Way for Students to Share Their Knowledge: Ideas from AASL 2017
By Laura Guest
I still struggle to find ways for students to share what they’ve learned besides the infamous research paper (yes, it has a time and a place). Though I’ve never had a student beg me to post their paper online, I am sure students will want to share their green screen projects. After much professional reading and a successful Donor’s Choose grant “Put the ‘A’ in STEaM” I came up with a way for students to create book reviews, curriculum talks and skits written by the students without their faces in the video! Students will be able to create simple pictures on a stick (copyright free of course) or make puppets to use with a Green Screen allowing it to be posted on our school Facebook page and YouTube. Motivation to do their best? Authentic evaluation?
I stopped by the Idea Lab table on Green Screening—Who, What, Why & How? presented by Jane Lofton, Michelle Luhtala and Deborah Schiano to get more specifics on how to actually make it work in my library. Their presentation can be seen at http://bit.ly/aaslgreenscreenslides.  They also have directions to “try it out today” in a Google Doc bit.ly/aaslgreenscreen
Possible projects could include:

• Book Talks—the cover of their favorite book as the background with a picture on a stick telling title, author, age interested, genre and why someone might light it
• Curriculum: Science—video of a volcano, tsunami, etc. behind a puppet explaining it. Social Studies—13 colonies stick picture of the most important person from each colony explaining how and when they were founded and the most interesting fact about that colony.
• Maker Space—writing a script and creating their puppets for their own story.
• Tour of the School and/or the Staff or the school’s website
  
  Of course, with a 30 minute per week library class which includes check out, it would be impossible to accomplish the above in a timely fashion without collaboration with the classroom teacher.​

​drive.google.com/open?id=0BzNI053tizEZdDBBbkhZTDBZNmZ3ZUVNNVo1MldZazJOdXdN