Student video activity to include in my film class

I attended the NECTFL conference in Boston a few weeks ago and walked away armed with a variety of new activities to try out in my classes. One of these ideas came from a session by  two speakers who presented their "lessons learned" from teaching an online introductory Spanish class. In liue of the traditional in-class student presentations, they had students create videos and upload them to their content management system for other students to view. This is a fabulous idea that I will also use in the live classroom.

Students in my 300 level Spanish and Latin American Film course each make one presentation on a cultural topic related to one of films from the course. (See my posts for films También la lluvia and Chico y Rita.)  These presentations are usually quite well done, and include a Power Point, visuals, etc. However, I have always struggled to find a way to make the student audience more responsive to their peers´ presentations, and to hold them accountable for the information they learn through these presentations. Voila! Students will now need to create videos rather than make in-class presentations. It will require a bit more time on my part, but I hope it will be work the extra effort. This is my plan for fall semester:

1. Student presenter creates a video for their presentation. They may choose their format, allowing for as much or as little technical creatively as they possess. Some suggested platforms for them include:

• iMovie
• Prezi
• Lego Movie Maker

If anyone has other suggestions, please share!

2. Student presenter uploads document to Blackboard 5-7 days before I want the rest of the class to view it.

3. I watch presentation and create 4-8 comprehension and analysis questions that the rest of the class needs to answer while they watch movie.

4. Rest of class watches video and answers questions as a homework assignment. 

I like the idea of students creating their own videos in a film class - I don't expect feature-film quality from them, but it still feels like a good fit for the course.  I'll let everyone know how it goes!

Update:  I loved this project! Students all chose to complete their presentations using Prezi, which worked quite well. Creating the comprehension questions was not difficulty on my part, and I think the students learned more from each other's presentations with this format. I will definitely be repeating this activity next fall. Another alternative to Prezi, would be screencasting. Darcy Lear has a great post that includes the screencasting idea here.