Academic Honesty

The whole class was set a task to make a short movie that has a theme of academic honesty. My group included Måns, Mark, Elvijs and Francesco. The first deadline that we had for the movie was after three weeks that we were given the task. And for that day we had made a trailer for our short movie because that deadline didn't require the whole complete movie. Our idea was to make a movie about two journalists who work for a small office and we wanted to show one of the characters as hard working and honest (me) and the other character as lazy and ignorant (Mark). The conflict of the movie was that the lazy character copied the bosses work from old times and entered it as if it was his own work while the hard working character researched his information and worked hard for the article that he submitted. Two other characters of the movie are also the Boss (Elvis) and a friend of the lazy character (Francesco). Måns was the editor and the main camera man of the movie. We wanted to make the movie with a developing story line where the two characters meet the boss and then they start working on their article. Also we added a foreshadowing of the ending of the movie as a first scene.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJRcJxBGc7E

Whole movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoi44ALsl4

Overall we filmed our movie for two times and it took around 5 hours. Editing probably took the same time or even longer. In order to improve, we should use original songs and not downloaded ones because the movie is anyway about academic honesty. We could´ve also add more aspects of academic honesty than only the idea of stealing someones work. Generally we were happy about our movie and would most likely do the same again. 

The Beat Stays In Da Box

The beatbox club has been doing great. Though, I have only one person who has been attending the club regularly and he is Han. I have also had problems of having the club every week because on some Fridays I haven't been in school. I was also about to abandon the club because of the extreme low rate of participants, however, yesterday Han told me so enthusiastically that he would like to continue attending and seriously learn how to beatbox I decided to continue the club and not let go. It really doesn't matter if there is only one person attending the club especially if he/she is keen to it. Also I discovered that teaching one participant allows me to concentrate more on the individuals learning. This can be seen also in Han's improved skills. He has made a great improvement since the first day that he participated. I have been teaching him relatively basic beat patterns so that he could adopt a clear idea and the basic requirements for in order to proceed to more complex beatboxing. So far he can recall three different beat patterns and he was able to show them to me yesterday at the club. I was impressed of his abilities. I have been teaching him some but not many new sounds what he could include to his beats, however the main emphasis should be in learning to beatbox different  beat patterns in a way that Han could also form his own beats and improvise with the learned sounds. This though requires lots of practice which Han has clearly been doing. My teaching methods include   considering participants' wishes of what they would like to learn. Yesterday Han wished to learn to form a whole performance of one beat in a way that it sounds in two different ways which means changing the emphasis of a specific sounds when having the second repetition of the beat. He wanted to add to the end of the bar a sound that would allow him easily to have a clear end to the beat and an easier start for the repetition of the beat. We worked on that perhaps 10 minutes and he was already able to perform it in a very good way. He needs to practice of course in order to make the sounds sound more clear.

The beat patterns (circled sounds show the emphasis)

My goal from now on is to try teach Han beatboxing in a way that he can become more of an individual beatboxer who can include own ideas to the creation of beats which he already has been started to do. I'm happy with the methods that I have used in my teaching however, I should start teaching Han more new sounds, in which I'm not so good at because my own beatboxing is based on different combinations of few sounds. There are two things I could do in order to teach Han more sounds. 1. I should slowly start teaching him every single sound that i can do or 2. I could learn new sounds myself or with him together which would be very effective co-learning for both of us. I haven't decided yet which one I will use but time will show. I will also ask Han's opinion of what would he prefer or if he has any other ideas. So far I have encountered problems only when I have tried to teach some complex sounds to the participants, otherwise I have enjoyed my time as a teacher and as long as the participant(s) is/are happy and enjoying, I will also.