Green Screen in 2nd Grade: Celebrating Classroom Teachers Series

The plan of this article series is to celebrate how my classroom teachers are integrating technology into our district curriculum. There are many awesome teachers in our school district doing great things in our 1:1 iPad classrooms. The first article of the series is inspired by a lesson that I assisted in yesterday.

Mrs. Semple, a 2nd grade classroom teacher at Edna Libby, wanted her students to learn how to use Green Screen by DoInk. So for the first lesson we decided to create a whole group video. In the future we will have another lesson where students will create their own videos on their iPads.

What we did:
1. Mrs. Semple had her students practice reading a reader's theater fluently before we had the whole group lesson. (When students know that they are going to be recorded they tend to be motivated to practice reading.)
2. Once the students were ready we met as a whole group. I showed the class a video (the first 6ish minutes) I created with students last year using a green screen plus explained the green screen process and tips. Other video examples... Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 5th grade
3. The classroom teacher picked one group to read their piece in front of the green screen while the classroom teacher recorded the readers. The rest of the students watched the reader's theater.

  

4. We went back to the classroom and Mrs. Semple projected her iPad on the whiteboard so that we could do the rest of the project as a whole class.
5. We used Safari to save some background pictures to the photo library on the iPad. We then had students recall the settings or key points of the story that would make a good background. Mrs. Semple searched for the images and then saved them to the iPad camera roll.
6. With my assistance Mrs. Semple modeled how to add the video and photos in the green screen app. I also showed them how to resize the video so that the parts of the video that did not have green in the background was no longer visible. We added several backgrounds so I also showed the class how to trim an item to make it easier to add a new item, in this case an image. Video can also be trimmed as well.
7. Mrs. Semple saved the finished video, airdropped it to the four student readers in the video, and then those students uploaded the video to their Seesaw account. Mrs. Semple plans to finish up with the other two groups soon.

I love love love that students were able to add the videos to their Seesaw portfolio so that parents can see the learning that is taking place in the classroom.

Additional Resources:
How To: DoInk Green Screen

Using "Green Screen" iPad app by Do Ink (Screen Cast Tutorial)