I met with Eve and Linda's Humanities classes today to introduce the project for their "Child Labour" unit. Students are researching some aspect of child exploitation in the modern world and tying it to the conditions of children in the Industrial Revolution.
We asked the students to imagine that they are coordinators of an outreach group that is trying to raise awareness about the plight of children working in difficult conditions. Each student will pick some aspect of the issue: carpet making, athletic shoes, exploitation, etc. After some in-depth research, the students will take on the role of an advertising agency tasked with marketing the human rights issue the student is targeting.
Students were asked to imagine that May is "Child Labour" month, and as part of a nation-wide campaign, they needed to produce a brochure (using Word) explaining the campaign issue, as well as a short, 30 second "spot" (using Animoto) that could be run on television and Youtube to raise awareness.
BROCHURE:
The brochure is being produced using the "business forms -> brochures" template from within Word. In order to introduce the technology piece, we spent some time choosing a format and playing with inserting and manipulating images.
(Students were also given the option of downloading templates from the internet: sample set 1, sample set 2.)
Note: If Word seems too complicated, or the teacher is looking for a more straight-forward way to produce a flyer, check out the "Mybrochuremaker" site.
Here's a sample made using this service:
Child Labour Brochure
The 30 Second "Spot":
We took the students to the Animoto site and had them create an individual account. Animoto will allow students to create professional looking flash movies that can be downloaded or posted to Youtube. They can upload pics from their computer or their Flickr or Facebook account. After picking the order of the images and adding text, they can pick music from a library of tunes or upload their own. Students can remix the project numerous times and then pick the best one for public viewing.
Once they are finished, they then email the embed code to their teacher so it can appear on the class blog.
Here's an example of Animoto in action from another project:
