Reflection+5,+3.23.12

=A New Day, A New School=

Today my school tour of Philadelphia brought me to Russel Byers Charter School. I really loved the atmosphere from the staff at this school, they were very welcoming. When I first arrived there was an "all school assembly", which they have about every 2 weeks or so, it went on for a while but it was very cute to hear the 5 year old's singing about monkeys and alligators and the water cycle to the whole school. I was really excited to be able to recognize some faces from the youtube videos we had to watch earlier in the semester.

I worked with John Landis for the morning. John, the school's technology guy and "computers" teacher, has a great vision for the school. He wants for the academic curriculum and "specials" curriculum to integrate. That would be ideal, because kids learn Art, Music, and Media Literacy to be able to express themselves so it would be great to learn to express what academic material they learn through new media outlets they learn. However, John thinks that the planning and collaboration necessary for this to happen is too much to ask from the teachers.

Today, in "computers" the learning objective was to teach about camera angles. Before class started John gathered the materials needed for the days lesson: Dice, the student's cameras, worksheets, and pencils. When the students came in they were accompanied by an additional teacher who helped with the duration of the class. The engaging question was "how do you feel when someone takes a picture of you?", this question lead to many different answers such as, "like a celebrity", "excited" and so on. However, when John continued to fish, he changed the question to "How do you feel when people take your picture and you don't want your picture taken?", this lead to the type of response he was fishing for. He wanted to establish some ground rules in photo-snapping that it is important to ask to take someone's photo first and if they do not want their picture taken to oblige.

John demonstrated what the different camera angles were with the assistance of a volunteer from the class. He portrayed with a projected image what each of the frames from the different angles would look like, and then showed physically with the camera in his hand how to position yourself with the object/person when you want to take a picture from that particular angle.

The class activity was very clever. In pairs we traveled up to the main lobby and with a dice, worksheet and camera the activity began. The kids had to roll the die to figure out what type of shot to take. The first roll decided whether the shot was a high, medium or low angle. The second roll was to establish if they needed to take a Medium Shot, Long Shot, Close up, or extreme close up. And the third roll was to figure out what emotion to portray, just for fun. The activity went on with each partner taking turns being the photographer and the victim. By the end of the class the students had started to go around and just take random pictures of each other and themselves, which, to other teachers would seem like chaos but John was happy to see it happen because they were freely expressing and practicing the tools that they had just learned.