Live From Olympia
Project Inspiration: Students are fascinated with Ancient Greece and I thought it would be interesting for students to take their inquiry questions and interest video-making and combine it into a collaborative project. This project could be for grades 6 and up depending on the curriculum.
Essential Question: What if we lived in Ancient Greece? What is the importance of Ancient Greece to us today? What can we learn about ourselves from the Ancient Greeks?
The Situation: A film crew has been transported back in time to report on Ancient Greece. It is your job to do research on an aspect of Ancient Greek life for the film crew. You are also charged with creating the scripts the film crew will follow when they go live with a new program called: Live From Ancient Olympia.
Note: Prior to beginning the actual project students read some ebooks (Rosen Publishings Interactive eBooks on Ancient Greece) on Ancient Greece to get perspective and background information. These are fantastic ebooks that are simotaneous use with are my favorite! Timelines and keywords defined. There are so many resources. Full Disclosure: I am good friends with one of the reps. But it is still an awesome resource and there are no other eBooks out there like it. The key to the success of the project is organization and the use of jobs in each group. The project began with the Marshmellow Challenge to get students to begin to work together and think about each person’s strengths.
Each group includes:
- Manager—keeps group members on task; communicates with teacher; provides leadership
- Reporter—keeper of all records; manages paper; tracks “who’s doing what”
- Techie—manages the group’s technology needs; knows how to use the technology or is willing and able to learn new technology as needed for this project.
- Archivist—organizes found stories, photos, and artifacts
Each class (of 4-5 groups) work on one news broadcast. Therefore, in each class there was one video editor, one camera person, and two anchors. This worked extremely well for creating the video. Not all students are interested in video editing and it can be time-consuming so those students interested in the process can be involved. The feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive. They enjoyed the process and learned a lot.
You can see some examples of the project here