Time to teach kids Multimedia!

[Jewrean]

Hey everyone. I'm a high school teacher and next year I will be teaching Multimedia which is awesome.

"mul·ti·me·di·a/ˈməltiˈmēdēə/
Noun:
An extension of hypertext allowing the provision of audio and video material cross-referenced to a computer text.
Adjective:
(of art, education, etc.) Using more than one medium of expression or communication."

The great part about it is that I can pretty much teach whatever and however I want unlike a rigid and structured Math class.

My question is simple, if you were in high school (some of you still are) and loved multimedia (which most of you do by playing games and watching movies, etc), what would be a great unit of work for the class?

So far I have:
- Make a website
- Image Editing (Photoshop / The Gimp / Paintshop, etc)
- Video (Adobe Premier / Movie Maker, etc)
- Animation / Stop Motion

 

[Pat728]

When I was in school, I disliked what they taught me. I probably only liked technology because my grade/high schools didn't make us learn it, and I could figure it out on my own. Whatever you do, try not to make it tedious.

Things like making a website, image editing, video editing, and animation could already take up an entire semester/quarter. Perhaps consider some programming with something on the easier side like python or maybe some easy game dev with game maker. Like I said before, what you mentioned already could easily be a year's worth of material.

 

[Dags90]

How about covering how to build and maintain a PC without needing six antivirus programs, tech support and every spam update Microsoft releases? That'd be pretty damn handy. Bonus points if they could take their completed rigs home with them afterward.

That doesn't have anything to do with multimedia though. Like, at all.

I've always wanted to know how to make flash animations, and I hear that's quite time consuming. Could you maybe work in green screening? That sounds neat.

 

[Shadow flame master]

Get them to make a movie and show them how to make it available to their PSPs/PCs/iPODs etc. Teach them how to make a score of music for their movie and then show their completed product to the class as a final test grade.

Other than that, I got nothing seeing as it's 11:33PM in my time zone I'm a bit tired and lethargic.

 

[Dags90]

...Then what are you going to watch it on, thin air?

Not thin air...a Macbook Air...

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Photography and video, i.e. working with a camera. Probably not going to be too useful, but it could help.

 

[justsomegirl]

I second the flash/programming ideas! Maybe some of the pretty things HTML5 can do? (If your school has browsers that will run it...)

On the image-y side, Illustrator or Indesign would be cool to cover.

Depending on the grade level you're teaching, a game project could be really cool. You could have them make their own sound effects/music, create the sprites, and do some basic programming to put it together. (I know there's a program that helps with this but I can't remember the name right now.) Bonus marks for kids who put in a cut scene?

You may also want to check out Alice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(software)

 

[Jewrean]

I've always wanted to know how to make flash animations, and I hear that's quite time consuming. Could you maybe work in green screening? That sounds neat.

Good idea, I've fiddled with Green Screening before in Premier as well as lightning, fireballs, and light sabres. I'm sure the kids will like that.

Get them to make a movie and show them how to make it available to their PSPs/PCs/iPODs etc. Teach them how to make a score of music for their movie and then show their completed product to the class as a final test grade.

Good idea. I'll show them some Open-Source / Freeware video conversion programs that can convert to AVI / MP4. And I make Techno music in Fruity Loops and I think there's a free version of that. I could get that for them too.

 

[Jonluw]

I would say image editing, but I'm hardly representative of your average high school student.

 

[hawkeye52]

This sounds very much like the media studies A level in the UK which is generally considered to be one step above general studies but if you want to see what its like in the UK heres a sylabus of what they teach here across the water.

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-2570-W-SP.PDF

 

[Sonicron]

They actually taught us how to make a website back in school. I found it to be a lot of fun, and it's not that difficult; that said, the topic took up an entire semester (two lessons per week), so if you don't have that much time for the teaching unit, maybe you should do something else.
You know, maybe you could make another thread during or after your multimedia teaching unit. Seeing how I'm studying to go into the same profession, I'd sure like to hear what you ended up doing, how it went and how the kids reacted.

 

[MercurySteam]

Earliest multimedia I remembered was basic video and audio editing and Flash. It's definitely a good place to start.

It's best to start off teaching the youngest years with easy programs (Windows Movie maker, Audacity, Adobe Flash Maker).

 

[Shymer]

I would like some time spent on the theory behind successful use of multimedia - information and communication theory and NLP for example. Practical work modules on building web sites and the like is fine - but the Internet is littered with badly presented, poorly written, over-indulgent examples of multimedia. Learning how to make/edit/publish it is worthless unless you understand how different people take information in.