The Inquiry Question

For our inquiry we decided to focus on the pros and cons of a classroom website. We thought this topic was intriguing because there are diverse opinions on it. When we were brainstorming ideas for this question, we thought of our classroom discussions. We considered accessibility, privacy and usefulness. How can it be accessible to all families, does it ensure our students privacy and is it useful for our students. We also compared it to the more traditional method of a monthly or weekly newsletter via paper. From here we landed on the idea of filming a dramatization where we interview teachers and parents so that we could express our thinking. 

Exploring the Tech

Chat GTP:

For this project we decided to enlist our friend ChatGPT to help us in making our script. We began with asking it to make us a script with this prompt: “Pros and cons of using a class website in their classroom. Interview style with teacher and parents.” This first script was good, and covered our main points that we had agreed on for our pros and cons list for class websites. We were convinced ChatGPT heard us, which it probably did. Although this first script was good we wanted it to have a few more details. We then regenerated the response with this prompt: “Pros and cons of using a class website in their classroom. Interview style with teacher and parents. One parent and teacher uses websites. One parent kid’s classroom uses newsletters.” This prompt gave us a more detailed script with specifics of the benefits and drawbacks of both newsletters and classroom websites. We then took what we liked from each generated script and put them together. This created an eloquently spoken script that took us minutes to make. Thank you ChatGPT.

Video Editing and Accessibility:

We decided to film a video to showcase our project for multiple reasons. We thought it would be impactful to see a conversation played out in a theatrical way which worked well in video format. Moreover, the fact that this presentation was for a technology education course in which we learned about videos and editing, we figured it was appropriate to represent our learning in this topic. To create our set we transformed my living into a talk show stage and set up our camera next to my T.V. Another tech feature we had in the filming process was AirPlaying our script document to the T.V. so that we can read it during filming. We had a great time filming and discussing what parts of the script we liked or needed to further edit. As for the editing we used the trusty IMovie app where we did the basic cutting and clipping of the video takes. However, we found out that the mobile IPad version of IMovie was not as comprehensive as the computer version. At that point we switched to the computer version and added clapping and cheering tracks, transitions, theme music, and text titles. Once completing this we uploaded it to youtube so we were able to make it accessible by adding subtitles. Here we did have to take some time to edit them so they were correctly corresponding to our words. Overall, we agreed that while the video, and editing process had trials and tribulations we thought it was a fun, and informative way to explore our topics.

Employing Creativity

We employed creativity in the format we chose to display our findings. We knew we wanted to create a video that explored the use of classroom websites and newsletters, but didn’t want the video to be a presentation that we could have done in person for our class. We discussed the idea of a conversation between teachers and parents, and ultimately landed on an interview style video. We decided that the video would be in the form of a talk show about all things education, with this segment being about classroom websites vs newsletters. We wanted to have both teacher and parent perspectives, and wanted to make sure it hit on the pros and cons of each. To break up the interview we decided to have an ad for ChatGPT, which had helped us create the script for our interview, which was pretty creative we thought.

Below is our edited video that explores our inquiry question and the use of Chat GTP: