Centre4 - Time4 Celebration - Collaborative dancing

Collaborative dancing

Allanah King, facilitator for the Discover IT Tasman cluster, talks about a collaborative dance project made in conjunction with classrooms all across New Zealand and overseas. Discover IT Tasman are a third year cluster based around the Tasman region.

Collaborative dance video

Purpose

The project started out as a bit of fun - it ended up that way too. We thought we would make a collaborative video in a similar style to the Where the hell is Matt video that is wildly popular on YouTube. By having a collaborative dance video we were able to transcend cultural and language barriers as everyone loves to move and dance- it is pretty universal.

Process

I wanted the video to have an element of New Zealand wide participation but also wanted to include our global audience so I blogged about it on my education blog and on Twitter I also mentioned it when I was moderating the K-12 Online conference. These avenues ensured that we got more than just New Zealand videos and added a little cultural diversity.

I asked that people email their videos to my little used gmail address so as to keep my main email spam free in case it got picked up by a spammer. I had a bit of trouble converting some of the videos as they came from various operating systems and in a variety of formats and I had to use a couple of on line video converters. I can’t quite remember now but I think http://zamzar.com was used there somewhere along the way and it was fortunate that I had Parallels on my Mac so I could view all files easily on either the Apple or PC format.

I used iMovie06 to create the final video (as I haven’t got the hang of iMovie08 yet). I then exported it as a Quicktime movie file for uploading into ‘the cloud’. Along the way I either stripped away the original soundtrack or lowered the volume so that a universal sound track from Freeplaymusic could go over the whole set to tie the thing together. I also added subtitles so people would know where in the world the videos came from.

The finished the movie was uploaded to Fileden and TeacherTube so that people could either view it directly with streaming video or download the higher resolution video if they wanted to to play it back for whole class viewing.

Product

People were asked to send in up to 20 seconds of video so I could put it together with the final cut off date 7 November - giving people plenty of time to organise themselves. The quality of the resolution of the video varied quite a bit as some teachers did not have access to digital video recorders but all videos were included in the spirit of global collaboration.

Here is the video that I have uploaded to YouTube.

Reflection

pattern 1 It would be great to do a similar kind of thing again as it was so much fun to se what others had come up with and didn’t take very long to complete. It just needed someone with a bit of time on their hands to act as a hub for everyone to send their videos in to. Kids seem to have got into the spirit of it and looked forward to seeing the finished published product.

Contributors

Thank you so much to all the contributers and their classes from around New Zealand, Canada, Bangkok, the United Kingdom, @fionagrant, @charbeck, @kathycassidy, @lisibo, @efreeman, @nzchrissy, @keamac, @teachernz, @leannehough, @lenva, @jaminlietze, @njt24 and to the hundreds of kids and their teachers who enjoy a sense of fun and adventure who like to participate in a community wider than their classroom walls.

Note: an @ before a name indicates that this is their username on Twitter - a microblogging platform where you can join a network of educators.