Green Screen App and Science

Today I worked with a Lego Lab teacher introducing the Green Screen App by Doink ($2.99) to students in grades 3-5. All of the iPads in this particular school have the app and are testing it for possible purchase on all our 3-5 iPads in the district.

Since today was an intro day we didn't get a lot of finished projects but the Lego Lab teacher and I created a sample project using content covered in the 4th grade (Solar System). To view the project CLICK HERE. One fourth grader did finish one project about going to Egypt that turned out pretty cute. To view that project CLICK HERE. I got silly with my sample project and became a reporter viewing the destruction of the Eiffel Tower. To view that project CLICK HERE.

The project idea came from the school's media specialist who saw it presented at ISTE this summer. She forwarded the Wiki site to us and we ran with it. The teacher got pizza boxes donated that we covered with green contact paper...until we ran out of it and then switched to green plastic party table cloths. We looked high and low for the green gloves she mentioned in her Wiki site but no dollar store - and we have a lot in our neck of the woods - carried those mythical green moisturizing gloves (I even checked their websites). I did find these stretchy green gloves at Walmart and purchased five pairs (see last picture).

Since we were working with small lego pieces it turns out that the green plastic straws she got at Publix worked best. Students taped the pieces to the straws using green painters tape and put the green gloves on just in case while manipulating their characters on the screen (we thought that paint stir sticks painted green might work as well).

Students created a series of small videos...each a part of a larger movie...and saved them to the camera roll. Once all their mini scenes were finished we imported them into iMovie so we could add background music and sound effects.

Now that students have experience with the app the teacher is going to have them create content based green screen movies as their final project.

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Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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