Sharing What You Know with Magic Movie

Asking our students to articulate their understanding is a fundamental educational practice. 

This often involves prompting students to reflect on their learning within a format that we ask them to use.

One of the things I love about the Apple platform is that once students have a basic understanding of the tools, we can allow them to choose what they feel is the best tool for them to use to articulate their understanding. The icons are the same across all the tools, they can be found in almost the same places across the tools and the sharing function is in the same place across them all. Reducing the cognitive load around the use of the tools frees them up to spend more of their energy on their creative thinking.

Recently I was working with a Year 4 class of students (7 and 8 year olds) who were learning about electricity. This was a great focus for building their video skills - Magic Movie made it so easy for them to share what they learned from conducting experiments about static electricity.

To begin with we discussed how to take great photos and videos so they could document their experiment.

Everyone Can Create Teachers Guide for Early Years has a great activity on Page 37 to help teach students about how to take a good photo.

To differentiate this stage, I showed them the long finger press trick on their photo to’ lift’ themselves off the page and save it without a background. We then searched on Unsplash for an appropriate background that would add to the story they were telling.

We combined the new photo and the photo with the background removed in Keynote and exported it as an image. Some students did this with only one photo and some did it with all four.

When they were ready to import their photos into Magic Movie we had a discussion around order (although some did drag and drop some around a little further into the process.)

Magic Movie is such a great way for students this age to quickly and easily share their learning.

They chose their overall theme, added some text using the Title feature to each photo and recorded a voiceover explaining about what was happening in the experiment. The helpful thing here is that the tools for each section are the same as what they would see in iMovie itself - developing those all important digital skills without overload. 

They saved their finished product as a movie and then shared it with their family on Seesaw.

If you haven’t used Magic Movie yet Jacob Woolcock has a helpful video that explains in simple steps how it works.

How might you use Magic Movie in your practice? I’d love to hear what you do with it.