Green Screens Rock and What I Have Learned the Last Two Years

Last school year (16-17) I purchased a green screen, some high powered magnets, an iPad stand, a mini microphone, and the Green Screen by DoInk iOS app with the $50 all teachers in our district get to spend. Some of my classroom teachers allowed me to try my purchases out with their students. We did things like student planet reports, fables, weather stories, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. Students recorded in small groups and individually. Since I was the only one who had the app and the equipment for my three schools it was unfortunately not feasible for students to create on their own.

The purchased equipment worked well. I did not iron my screen and probably should have, but it worked good enough for what we were doing. There is a trick to using the high powered magnets because if they become unwrapped from the screen and stick to the whiteboard, they are very difficult to get off the board. I usually slide a thin piece of paper under the magnet and then pull away holding both sides of the paper. The paper doesn't usually rip. Hahaha...

Then we get to this school year and the Green Screen app has been purchased and uploaded to all grades' 2-5 iPads. We are a 1:1 iPad district so that is a lot of purchased apps, but so worth it! We purchased two apps this school year, Green Screen and Book Creator. This has been a game changer because now the students are empowered to create! All classroom teachers, including grades K/1, have the app as well.

At the beginning of this school year I put up green screens using bulletin board paper. The bulletin board paper works very well and is easy to put up for a permanent location, however the location is key. One of the boards I put up is in a high traffic area and at bus dismissal students line up along that particular wall. As students walk by with their back packs, no matter how careful they were, the backpacks would inadvertently rub against the paper and create small tares. The shadow from the tares would sometimes show up on the finished green screen projects.

I would suggest if you need a quick green screen, bulletin board paper is an easy solution, but take care to choose where you place a bulletin board green screen.

Fortunately my principal gave me the go ahead to purchase paint for new green screens.

I found a list of suggested paint colors on the DoInk website under Frequently Asked Questions. I ended up purchasing Gamma Sector Green at Home Depot for $18. The Disney label has been removed, but the paint was still in Home Depot's system. I taped off any edge with Frog Tape that needed to be crisp, otherwise I cut in with a paint brush when I ran along other edges. I used a roller to apply the paint to the walls and not only did the screen work perfectly yesterday but also the three screens throughout the building have added a fun punch of color.

I guess word has spread throughout the school because students walk up to me and ask if I really painted the walls. So cute! I plan to paint two more screens at another one of my schools.

For one of my screens I had an outlet to deal with so I used some green felt and taped it to the outlet. That way if someone needs to use the outlet, they can and that too worked perfectly. I could not make out the spot where the felt existed on my test recording.


Using some sort of a stand works best when recording for green screen creations because even a little movement makes it look like the student is floating around due to the back drop being stationary. So unless you are shooting for a floating scene, and I have seen purposeful uses, a stand is best. Sometimes it is not feasible to purchase a stand, so in my graphic to the right you will see a few ways my students and I have gotten inventive. My goal is to have teachers and students not need me to be a part of their projects, even though movie making is one of my FAVORITE parts of my technology coaching job.

Microphones are also a good tool to have. I don't always use them and most of the time the audio is fine, but the further away the iPad is away from the subject, you have quiet spoken students, or other noises in the school, the harder it is to hear the student on the finished project. With my $50 this school year I purchased a new microphone and a couple stands. See the
picture to the left for more details. As you can see in the pic above, the chord length is quite short on the microphone I purchased last year.

The desktop stand on the top left of my recent purchases worked really well yesterday for a Valentine's Day project. We were able to quickly switch out student iPads. I also bought this stand to record towards the floor for small green screen projects. I have yet to try it out for that purpose as I only received these three items on Monday, but my plan is to use small rectangular shaped pieces of neon green felt to create puppet type green screen projects.

The sound of my new microphone was perfect and the cord was very long. It comes with a few different size chords so you can switch them out depending on your needs. I would like to get a few more microphones so that classroom teachers have access to them. Right now the microphones travel with me to my different schools.


Here are some of my students' projects...