5 Gathering digital assets
To conduct successful writing activities using a range of digital effects, you’ll need to explore how to get ‘assets’ – the technical term for sound files, pictures, video clips and text-based information.
The most obvious starting point is the DIY approach. Pretty well all modern mobile phones contain digital cameras, often with the ability to record video. MP3 players frequently allow sound recording. Video recordings not only capture moving pictures but also the accompanying sound, so they too can be deployed as audio recorders. Thus, even if your school is not equipped with the very neat and cheap equipment currently available, you can still do some very interesting work if you ask pupils to work in teams, and each team has access to one of these devices.
The prospect of sending students out to record images or sound may seem daunting or problematic, although some of the best creative work comes out of giving students autonomy. If it just doesn’t match the culture of your school, then your next approach should be to look for assets on the computers themselves – Microsoft Office applications, for instance, come with a huge library of clip art. This can be the visual equivalent of a cliché – we’ve seen these images so much that they’re often stale, hackneyed and disappointing. However it’s always worth checking through clip banks – occasionally the image exactly fits what you want to do. The shark/spider/scorpion clip art is ideal for the Macbeth exercise outlined in Resource 4, PowerPoint counterpoint.
If your school’s computers don’t contain the material, the internet abounds in free resources. Apart from the sites that are routinely blocked by ICT departments (often misguidedly) such as YouTube and Google Images, there are many very fine sources. The Poetry Archive, The British Library, The JISC collections, the Pathé News – all these archives are rich in fine source materials to play with in English. There are also sites that offer sound-file collections for free, and although these sound snippets are very short, they can often do the job very well (see the unit on podcasting for details of some of these sites).
Reflection
What is the right balance between offering students autonomy (a state that they frequently enjoy outside school) and controlling access to content and the method of its collection?
How would the students you teach respond to the challenge of making their own films, capturing their own images, and recording their own sounds – as opposed to making use of second-hand assets from the internet? What might be the risks and the advantages of offering them responsibility and freedom?
What are school policies on accessing the internet and the issues of e-safety?
Who ‘owns’ the access to archive sites such as Pathé News? Is the password held in the ICT department? Does your school or college have any system for sharing ideas, experiences and materials from such sites?
Other resources