Flickr Photos and Student Videos

My grade 5 students recently finished their PSA about Sustainability. The students worked in pairs and made I-Movies about various Sustainability issues such as Energy and Water Conservation. This entire project was a unique learning experience for both the students and myself. The students first researched their topic and wrote a script about: The Problem, The Causes of the Problem, and What You Can Do to Help. They were very tempted to use google images to find photos, etc. for their project and this lead to some interesting "teachable moments" about copyrights. Chrissy Hellyer was very helpful in providing information on how to use Flickr's advanced search feature to find Creative Commons photos. The students found that searching for images in this manner was still very simple. They were also very good about providing image attributions at the end of their videos. The videos will be downloaded to our local ISB YouTube. The students really enjoyed working on this project and their only complaint was they often had difficulty saving their work and the computers freezing up on them. I'm sure that if do a similar project again, they will run into less difficulties. I enjoyed this project because it allowed me to see how well these students could work together in small groups. It also allowed me to teach research, organizational and presentational skills.