Caterpillar: Who... are... you?
Alice: I- I hardly know, sir. I've changed so many times since this morning, you see...
Caterpillar: Who... are... you?
Alice: Well, don't you think you ought to tell me who you are first?
Just like Alice, in deciding who I wanted to be in my one minute commercial, I had to consider who would be my intended audience. My commercial is geared toward my future students and their parents. I wanted to showcase what it is like to be in the classroom with me, what I see as my professional strengths, and also who I am when I am just Erin, not "Mrs. Berthold." I am going to show this to my students on the first day of school and to their parents at back to school night. After watching my commercial, I hope students are excited about spending the year in my classroom, and parents feel at ease with me as their child's teacher.
I chose to make a remix rather than shoot all new footage for my commercial. This required going through video and image files in order to choose the ones I felt best represented the goals I listed above. I had to edit the videos down to a mere few seconds in which a glimpse of who I am is still present. Next, I played with the order in which I would present these files and how I would caption them. I created the components for this commercial using Movie Maker and iMovie. Following this, I used Stupeflix to put the whole thing together. After several edits, I am finally happy with the finished product. Stupeflix is a free video editing web app, although there are paid memberships which allow for better quality downloads and more options. I applied for an educator account which allowed me to upgrade to 720p definition for free, and will allow me to create accounts for my students. This project would be really fun to replicate with my first graders!
In addition to this blog post, I also embedded my commercial on the "About" page. This will make it more accessible as the blog grows. I am also going to add it to my classroom website to make it easily available to my students’ families.