Three, two, one...ACTION!

Hello people and neurons!

Have you enrolled in any course? Come on! Don’t be lazy and be curious! As teachers we need to teach and learn everyday; it doesn’t matter if the course is about Chinese cookery and culture or projects based learning. The important thing is that your brain works, in this way you will encourage your children to be active people, to have curiosity and not to be a couch potato 🙅

Today is the day! Chroma is here! My group and I went to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports last Thursday. Specifically, we went to Future Classroom Lab. It’s a classroom with amazing chairs (yes, my right neuron fell in love with them) and a big green wall. You remember that I explained what Chroma is two posts ago, don’t you? So, we recorded ourselves with an improvised prompter and a mobile phone; the professional recorder decided not to work thad day. It was a good experience and I got some ideas to apply into my classroom.

The recording was in different steps; in total we recorded more or less 20 videos, there were 5 or 6 bloomers very fun. Our creator, Soraya, was the editor, so she brought the videos at home and we start playing with them. How did she make it?:

• Video: you have to cut the video because sometimes there are gestures or sounds that you don't want them to appear. The app that can make that is QuickTime. It's quite easy to use; apart from cutting the video, you can record your voice, record your screen and record yourself. 
• Edition: as you know, I used iMovie. It was easy? Well, Google and YouTube helped me a little bit to figure out how to mix music, headlines, the background photos and our videos without making any mess! Is it intuitive? I love trying new things and touching and clicking here and there, but it arrived one moment that I had to look for tutorials. Is it a waste if time? No way! I can't be happier with the result. It took time, but tell me that you don’t love it! 💞
• Backgrounds: Pixabay was my friend but iMovie also helped me. It's got picture and video backgrounds where you can add words. You cannot change the templates, but for this project I didn't need to change them; they were quite useful.
• Sounds: GarageBand has got sounds that you can incorporate into iMovie (I love when the apps sincronice themselves). Besides I looked for more sounds and audio effects online. On this website you can find a lot of free sounds, you can pay too for more. 
• Patience: a lot of patience to create this and don't make the laptop fly across the window!

Our project was called Channel 4, we wanted to create a news programme where our kids have to work in different areas. The storyboard is here and now, now I am so proud of introducing the amazing, the fantastic, the unbeatable video. Enjoy it!

I started to play with Chroma in my lessons, only to check if green paper could be an alternative to green paper and it worked! I recorded some of my students with the app TouchCast; highly recommended it. In this app the templates are done, then you avoid all the time with the edition step (this is very important because the time that you spend in an activity is very crucial for your organization; I liked iMovie but I know that I couldn't use each week for the following reasons: the time and the surprise element; maybe TouchCast can solve the problem about the time and for the surprise element I can create different programmes, not only news).

I hope this post encourages you to do different things in your lessons and start to use Chroma or videos in general. Have fun!

TwoTwo

P.S. In some parts of the video, on the right side, you can see ghosts. They are not ghosts, these are us that didn't control quite well the light on the wall 😬