Video Cameras with Students

Last week my school division hosted a HUGE youth conference in Cold Lake. The theme of the conference was CARE TODAY: IT'S OUR TOMORROW! We had Farley Flex (Canadian Idol judge) as the emcee of the event. In addition to Farley Flex there were speakers like Spencer West, and Craig Kielburger from Free the Children. Theo Tams (Canadian Idol contestant) and local artist who has been very successful in the Canadian music scene Lex Justice were among them many other performers. 

Basically the whole day was a rock concert environment to bring awareness to local and global issues and to encourage our youth to play an active role in trying to make a difference no matter how small. 

I gave my LA 9 class 6 Kodak Zi6 cameras to use for the day to get some of the mayhem from the crowd. You would not believe how much noise 800 grade 9 students can make! (actually you probably can if you're a teacher). I just thought it was a cool way to get an alternate perspective. 

Following the event I asked my students about what they thought was good about the day, what needed to be improved and what they learned. Here is what they blogged. Some posts give an interesting look into the mind of our impressionable grade 9 students. 

I was the 'video guy' along with my high school multimedia crew who shot the event and will be editing our highlight video for our school board. We shot with 2 Canon FS200 SD memory card cameras, which I highly recommend. You get manual exposure and focus plus a mic input all for around 300 bucks Canadian. I got ours from Vistek for 309.99. 

Once we get permission from the artists for our 10 minutes highlight video, I'll post a link to it on Youtube. 

Has anyone else used video cameras? What do you use? What projects have you incorporated them into?