Assignment: The News From Abroad

This is part of a series suggesting different ways to use Moviestorm in schools or other educational environments. They also make useful exercises for film-makers wanting to develop and practice different film-making techniques. Many more lesson plans and ideas, with free downloadable resources, can be found on the Moviestorm Web site.

Assignment: The News From Abroad
Present the news in a foreign language.

Suggested techniques

You can pick a single story and cover it in depth, or a series of shorter news reports to make up a news show.

Pick a story about the country whose language you are learning.

Intersperse the presentation with still images and video if appropriate. You could do this as a studio presentation or lecture, and display the images on a screen behind the presenter, or cut away to reporters in the field, interviews, and video segments.

Add extra content on-screen by using text to complement what you’re saying.

For teachers: benefits to students

• The student is required to demonstrate fluency with the words required to describe topical events.
• The student has to find out a little about the country they’re learning about. Their choice of story can then lead on to classroom discussion.
• Dramatic reconstruction makes for a good group project.
• Adding multimedia content enables the student to approach the subject in a richer way than just using written text and still images.
• Creating a multimedia presentation helps develop presentational skills and requires the student to consider what information is best presented using the different media: spoken, written, or visual.

Suitability

• Ages 14+
• Suitable for groups
• Languages

Downloadable resources

Click the link to download a Moviestorm movie template.

cloud.moviestorm.co.uk/Lesson_Plans/News%20Program.zip

Installation instructions:

Download the file and extract the zip folder to this location:

Vista, Windows 7, Macs: [Username]/Moviestorm/Movies

Windows XP: C:/Documents and Settings/[Username]/Moviestorm/Movies