Austin Film Festival's Digital Storytelling Curriculum examines the art of storytelling as a critical tool for communication. Developed collaboratively with Austin Film Festival and Austin Independent School District secondary English teachers, Digital Storytelling is nine-week, English language arts screenwriting curriculum in which all students…

Although the benefits of using video as a learning tool in Extension programs are well known, less is understood about effective methods for creating videos. We present a five-step procedure for developing educational videos that focus on evidence-based practices, and we provide practical examples from our use of the five steps in creating a video…

Dvolver is a free moviemaking platform that allows users to employ animated characters to develop fun, concise scripts in a digital format. The author and a co-teacher created a 45-minute lesson plan for teaching students at the upper-beginner and lower-intermediate skill levels. The purpose of this article is to describe the utility of Dvolver…

The use of technology has proven to be a successful tool for enhancing the learning of children with disabilities. One example is the use of video-recorded social story movies as interventions for children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through the use of electronic devices such as iPads, iPods and tablets, social stories are brought to…

Preparing secondary students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for a variety of potential professions is important to enhance their postsecondary employment outcomes. This article provides step-by-step guidelines for practitioners to use video modeling interventions to develop the customer service skills of students with ASD who are employed or…

A film script is a useful tool for allowing students to experiment with language variation. Scripts of love stories comprise a range of language contexts, each triggering a different style on a formal-neutral-informal linguistic continuum: (1) technical cinematographic language in camera directions; (2) narrative language in exposition of scenes,…

This article details the work of third grade teacher, co-author Kim Heckart, as she engaged her students in making historical documentaries: a project that succeeded in reaching all of her third-grade students. For the last five years, Kim has required students to make historical documentaries. As her students produced these works, Kim conversed…

Writing a screenplay was an assignment that was part of Storytelling Through Film, a program sponsored by the Austin Film Festival, a professional film organization. In six weeks, students in creative writing and English classes first learned about the genre of screenwriting and then wrote original screenplays. The curriculum was a collaborative…

At the end of a biology course entitled Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics, students were asked to consider how their learning experience had changed their perception of either ecology or genetics. Students were asked to express their thoughts in the form of a "digital story" using readily available software to create movies for the purpose of…

Golden West College (GWC) has been producing video tapes for classroom use since 1970, and has gained through experience useful insights about faculty and television production crews. Faculty members are content experts, accustomed to controlling everything that goes on in the classroom, and oriented toward the printed or spoken word rather than…

The major steps in the making of the film are presented in terms of events, time and cost. Appended are the shooting script, the shooting schedule, a sample of the film director's shooting breakdown, the editing breakdown, and the final draft of the script. (Author/SK)

The major steps in the making of a film are presented in terms of events, time, cost, and technological developments resulting from the production. Details about pre-production and post-production procedures are also included. Appended are the shooting script, the shooting schedule, a sample of the director's shooting breakdown, and the final…

The Action-Communication-Expression program, an extension of a speech communication class in a Houston (Texas) high school, involves visual and concrete communication, such as photography, script writing, and filmmaking. Students in two speech classes work in small groups of four or five, independently of the teacher, after receiving initial…

This booklet describes the creation of "In Their Own Words: Working in the Community College," a film based on in-depth interviews with community college faculty and designed as a discussion catalyst for a graduate seminar in education. Following background on the origins, purposes, planning, and funding of the film and on the pilot interviews…

Through the collaborative efforts of public health students and faculty, a state agency concerned with groundwater protection, and a local board of health, a video was produced on what local communities can do to protect groundwater from toxic contaminants. This document describes the planning and production stages of the film, emphasizing the…