Five minutes with Glenda Hobdell

A senior visual arts teacher at Queensland College for Creative Industries, Glenda Hobdell has developed a technology-rich visual arts program for her students. They now use industry standard software and hardware to share their artwork with artists, educators and other students throughout the world. Earlier this year, Glenda's passion for extracting the most from ICT earned her a Digital Pedagogy Licence Advanced. She was also a 2008 Smart Classrooms Teacher Award winner.

In your Smart Classrooms Teacher Awards application, you outlined an ICT activity. What is the activity?
A Year 10 video montage unit titled Moving Beyond the Text.

What is its purpose?
Students explore and examine images in their everyday lives. They investigate colour and dream symbolism, basic semiotics, and constructed representations of themselves through the codes and conventions of a video montage. They explore concepts of self, environment and culture by:

• identifying and analysing representations in still and moving imagery
• creating their own images by applying a knowledge of media languages and technologies
• experimenting and developing confidence with animation, camera and editing techniques
• exploring ways of expressing ideas and feelings with sound, vision and text
• analysing ways of presenting imagery and constructing meaning
• constructing and producing montage elements to communicate intended meaning
• creating a multi-layered video and audio production.

Early explorations of Photoshop and digital image capture have evolved into innovative and highly individualised artworks using sophisticated stop motion and Flash animations, high-end video editing, rotoscoping (drawing over video) and, most recently, games design, the use of games technology in video-editing (known as Machinima) and 3D modelling.

What resources does this activity require?
You need image capture devices (still and moving), sound-editing software and computers capable of running them.

I use Final Cut, Garage Band and Macromedia Flash (for rotoscoping) as well as Blender (for 3D modelling).

To incorporate the Machinima aspects, I have set up Sony Playstations and PC games (using parallels on the Mac) and video-capture devices such as the Canopus ADVC55: an analogue to digital converter.

Regardless of the platform and technology, the task can and has been adapted to what is available.

What have the learning outcomes been for your students?
Through this unit, students have learned a wide variety of knowledge, skills, techniques and processes to effectively communicate their ideas and understandings by constructing, producing, critically analysing and evaluating their own, original, multi-layered and meaningful montage artworks.

As well as constructing and communicating their own meaning, students engage in the critical analysis of the work of artists and filmmakers from a variety of social, cultural and historical contexts. They also work with their peers to develop their ability to effectively read the constructed symbolic representations of others.

In producing their montages, students have become skilled with storyboarding and camera techniques (including composition, filming conventions, using tripods and video capturing), developed their research skills (such as Internet research, critical analysis and creating formal written responses), learned and exploited new animation and editing software (including Macromedia Flash, iMovie, Final Cut, After Effects, Photoshop, Garage Band, Snapz Pro, Quicktime Pro and Blender), shared their developing ideas in the classroom and in online forums, and worked together to collaboratively share their experiences and solve emerging problems. When they finished the task, students shared and critiqued their outcomes.

What evaluation have you used to measure the success of your activity?

• Student engagement and outcomes: all students successfully submit works that are supported by evidence of connectedness and higher learning, regardless of prior experience and ability level
• Analysis of Productive Pedagogies
• Anecdotal evidence and observation: through process journals, group reflections, critique sessions and peer tutoring

Do you have any advice for teachers doing this type of ICT activity?
Don't be frightened to use technologies that students are familiar with, even if you are not adept with techniques yourself. While I have a degree of expertise with video making, my knowledge and experience with gaming is limited. I became aware of an emerging art form in Machinima, experimented and made it available in my classroom. The rest is history. My students never cease to amaze me.