Making Video

For the deaf, abstract matters are very difficult to grasp the concepts. For example, when I taught “Email account”, I defined it, “It is a place to keep and arrange your emails”, but a student asked me the question, “What is Place?” My brain stopped, “How can I explain Place? A place is a place to… no it doesn’t make sense… Well, a place is… Oh! For example, school, office, market and Savelugu is also a place… Ummm hold on, it’s a town and town is also a place…” Regrettably I couldn’t explain “place” well to that student. This always happens in my class. And I must explain it in sigh language, which has limited vocabularies as “theme”, “topic”, and “title” are the same sign. Anyway whatever excuses are, I want to give sophisticated education in ICT as a volunteer, thus I planned the final achievement as high as possible: students make a video for Savelugu School For The Deaf. 

In making video I think everything is created from “ideas” and “imagination” will enhance the quality of the video. And my main focus in making video is creativity or originality, which I teach as the same thing, saying “not copy others”, “different from others”, “new idea”, “your own idea” and “unique (only one)”. It wouldn’t be very easy for students to work on such a creative work, but I want to give them the special experience that other people can’t provide. In order to make up better Ghana in the future, people must Try & Continue and challenge new things that other people don’t do. You may imagine that to develop country is a big matter, but everything starts with an idea, and time doesn’t develop country, but small efforts of people in everyday life will do it, so I have started. 

Anyway making video is not very easy, so we worked on “presentation” with MS-PowerPoint in the last term for a start in order that students could acquire basic skills and knowledge for making video such as title, contents, animation, transition, inserting picture files, etc. And the most advantage to learn presentation is that students can be creative with colors, pictures, words animation, configuration in making slides and also when they give a talk (in sign language), they can express their feelings with their own words, though very few students did as such. In any event, it was a totally new experience for all students. And I made up groups according to the results of the previous term. I think “group work” is effective to cultivate the sense of responsibility, leadership, and collaboration. If one is lazy, others will suffer; all members must carry out each role to complete their job. And students worked on “Introducing Myself” for the mid-term and at the end of the term a presentation for Social Studies with the help of my colleague, Daniel. There’re interventions like power outage and teachers’ strike, but we could go through with the both presentations successfully.

And I started teaching making video in the 3^rd term. First I taught how to use the software, Windows Movie Maker and all groups made 2 videos with the same photos and videos. And due to the lack of weeks in this term, we had only 2 weeks left when students started the 2^nd project with free theme. I thought it was extremely difficult for them to complete videos because first of all they needed to come up with theme and scenario of video, then they had to shoot clips, and lastly they should edit video as they imagined. In fact they couldn’t make it before the exam, but they devoted themselves to the job everyday after the exam. Finally all groups completed videos on the due day. It’s a good example that devotion can make things happen. And on July 23, Tuesday night, teachers and all children enjoyed their videos with smile and laugh. Students seemed to find it very happy to make other people happy. Sincerity and devotion would never betray you. This is my way to go.