Our Finished American Revolution Video (A Masterpiece)

As I discussed in my plans for Social Studies Unit 3: The American Revolutionary Period, the entire unit revolves around a video that students work on that includes re-enactments of various major events from the American Revolution (click that link up there for more information). Well, the video is done. Now, a little disclaimer on this. The video making software I use is not free, and takes some technical know how to master (it's called CyberLink Power Director). I did most of the video editing on my more powerful desktop computer at home, and the student clips and sounds were all filmed on, believe it or not, my smartphone (sadly, it was my phones swan song, I went and got my new phone just a few days after we finished filming). The videos that I added in, and songs as well, were taken from Youtube. It's a grey area in my opinion, taking copyrighted material and using them in educational videos. It's a discussion I want to see out there more often, but in my own opinion, there's no profiting from the video, it's simply educational, and students loved this one.

I used a few websites to assist me here. For the songs I needed, I found them on Youtube, and converted them to mp3 using Youtube to Mp3. It goes without saying that I deleted these files when the video was completed.

Also, for the Youtube clips, I used KeepVid, a great tool that lets you download videos from Youtube in high quality.

Later this week, we have invited parents to join us for a showing of the video, which will be shown in the cafeteria on the big projector screen.

I wanted to show off this little gem here as well. I'm adding it here from my Google Drive, the file itself is a 1.3 gigabyte .mpg file, but it should stream. Check it out! Thanks go out to everyone who created the material we researched and borrowed from for this great learning experience.