Today I had the awesome opportunity to present Green Screen to the staff of Longfellow Middle School in my school district in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
The afternoon began with a staff meeting, where district administrators and Apple Development Executive Scott Meech honored the Longfellow staff, who recently received their Apple Distinguished School award for 2017-2019. The staff received certificates for completing the Apple Teacher program, and it was fun to be there as they celebrated.
After the meeting, the staff split into two groups, a beginner group and an advanced group. While half of them met with me, the other group got the opportunity to choose two mini-sessions in which they could learn more about lighting, masking, using green screen pizza boxes, and using the third layer of green screen.
I loved sharing examples of green screen, especially with the beginners, who really took to the magic of this app. They had fun learning about it, and jumped right into creating their own pictures, with funny themes like sitting on the beach, kissing puppies on the cheek, meditating in the woods, and crawling out of a coffee cup.
After we switched, I worked with the more advanced group, who I challenged to try using all three layers, and creating videos instead of just pictures. I also focused on fair-use images with this group, and introduced them to Pexels, my favorite site for finding royalty-free images.
At the end of the day, I had a great time chatting with Jeanne and Lyla about future possibilities for similar events at technology committee, as well as other ways to integrate technology in to the middle school ELA classroom.
It was a great day and I loved having the chance to get out of my classroom, into another building in the district, and laugh andlearn with teachers from a different level.
