Sitting in bed again (day two: post foot surgery), with a laptop literally in my lap, I non-linearly came across this captivating winning video (shot completely with a cell phone!)  via a link in a post update, via an email from a PLN site, via a Webinar I watched last week…titled “Split Screen: A Love Story.”

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

After watching it, I thought two things:

1. I want to make more videos for fun, not just for work  [maybe even for a living! wishful thinking, I know].

2. I want to make kids make more videos.

Just this video alone could be a brilliant teaching tool—for teaching perspective/POV in literature; if you want to get STAARy with it, for introducing paired texts; for teaching narrative development, just for starters.  If you wanted to get really basic, show kids the video, and have them draft stories of what’s happening, using first person.

From a filmmaking perspective, you could analyze how the film was shot, what cuts were used, what choices were made; you could assign kids a similar project–shoot a film with 2 sides, using a split screen technique.

The other finalist entries are equally rich.  I love “The Adventures of a Cardboard Box” for teaching creative thinking, digital storytelling, and pure, simple visual imagery.  Or “A Fish Story” for teaching questioning.

It also underscores the need for allowing kids to bring in their own technology as tools in the classroom. Of course, not all kids have phones with video cameras, but thankfully collaboration, one of the superstars of  the 21st Century ‘Skill Set,’ takes care of that if you let them work together.  So maybe it’s not so bad that the Flip will soon be no longer with us…