Week 8 - Stupeflix

Stupeflix(http://studio.stupeflix.com/) is a video-making site. Here are some of the types of video effects they provide:

You add your own photos, videos and text, choose from the site's music library, and create short, personal videos. This has a wide-range of applications in the classroom. The most obvious is using the Representative mode of communication. Students could make their own videos to illustrate a poem, or short fictional text, or part of a novel. Video dossiers could be made for the major characters of a novel. Students could use this to storyboard their own texts, or as a pitch to make a text into a movie. The videos that students make can also be used as part of a lesson for the other students to evaluate and critique.

Teachers can use this as a way of setting the context for a lesson by making a video with a series of photographs of a particular theme, and then getting the students to discuss the video. They can be drawn out to provide an interpretation of the video. Their knowledge of a particular topic can be gauged, vocabulary evaluated, interest aroused, etc. Teachers could make their own videos to illustrate a poem or part of a novel as a way of introducing it. The students could guess what the text might be about. Then the students could make their own videos, and the before and after videos compared and contrasted.

Here's a video I created, based on photos of a building site:

The main problem seems to be that you only get one video for free. Students could all get a free video, then if a similar video was needed for a lesson, another video-making site (Animoto, One True Media) could be used.