Classroom Scenario

Grade: 11
Area: English
Topic: Romeo and Juliet Video Scenes

Prior knowledge for making video projects the students would need to know how to work a video camera.  Also students would have to know the video making software on the computer to be able to upload it on YouTube. I would hold one class time for just going over how to work video cameras and how to use them properly. Another class period would be used to review and/or learn how to use the video software program. Students would have to sign out video cameras from the school.

A challenge a teacher would have to deal with is to make sure students did not do anything inappropriate on the video camera while filming. Before the filming began I would remind students the rules on what to shoot on their camera and guidelines. Another issue that might come up in making these videos are finding places for the students to shoot the video while in school. I would possibly have to reserve certain rooms in the schools for students to work in. Also I would not be able to watch over every group at the same time, so groups would be unsupervised during parts of the class period.

Before assigning the video project students would have read Romeo and Juliet. Students would also have seen clips from a movie on Romeo and Juliet. Students would know all characters, their roles, and most of the scenes. Students would be broken up into groups of 5. Each group would then be assigned a scene from Romeo and Juliet (Ex: the balcony scene). Students would decide among themselves who would play each part in the video (not all students have to have speaking parts in the video). The video would have to be 5 to 10 minutes long (depending on the scene). A rubric of what is going to be looked for in the video would be given out to each group. Some of the things that I would look for is that the characters are well defined in the video, you can clearly hear the characters in the video, it is within the time frame asked, and the scene makes sense and is not inappropriate. The timeline for this project would be broken into a week/week and a half. Students would be given 2 class periods to shoot the video, 2 class periods to put it on the computer and edit it. Then there will be one day of presentations of the videos to the whole class.