Digital Media Computing: a shopping list (part 2)

So, what else might I need for teaching a bunch of units when we haven't decided what units we will do as it depends on SQA deadlines, pupil interest, training courses available and budgets?

Video:
I have bid for five video cameras, tripods and some DV tapes. Alternatively I think we could borrow video cameras from around the school when we need to use them. We won't be going for fancy 3CCD cameras. Maybe we can find a way to borrow some once the pupils have mastered the techniques on little cheap commercial camcorders.

There is no way the lousy BT spec PCs will cope with Premiere Elements, so we will borrow the Apple laptops when we need to do editing.

Still images:
A bunch of digital cameras, maybe 5-6 per class of 20 pupils. You can get good Canon digital cameras and memory cards for £70 each these days. I would have liked to go for digital SLR cameras, but I think the cost is just to great. I'll maybe see if we can borrow these for a short time to give the pupils the experience of them.

We have a couple of scanners. I think that will be sufficient, but we may need to look again at this in the future.

Audio:
Microphones and Audacity open-source (free) software. We will also use the radio equipment that we have access to in the school

Games design
I have put a bid in for Mission Maker games design software (it is a wish list!) as we had talked with Modern Languages about using it for a cross-curricular project with the S2 pupils. It would be great for the games design units too. We will use Scratch, but Mission Maker would be wonderful, particularly for improving the kids' language skills.

Hardware:
At some point before 2011 we might need to acquire some PC components to build into a computer. I'm not going to teach the Hardware unit until S5 as it will be easier with smaller numbers and by then the pupils may be able to afford to buy components themselves to build their own gaming PC.

There will also be training costs and books/manuals. This depends on the software options we choose, so I can't work out costs yet.

So there we go, one more step along the path to changing our courses. The S2 Course Choice booklet got printed this week so I'm hopeful that it's going ahead! Now I just have to persuade some S2 pupils they want to choose the course!

Comments

[3ccd Camcorder]

You can use other cameras for your students. There's a lot of cameras out there to use in school. But, I don't think so the feature if fully satisfied you and some of the students. As a suggestion 3ccd Camcorder has a nice feature that satisfied all of you. I don't think if this is really cost too much. You can find many 3ccd camcorder here http://3ccd-camcorder.net which is not too expensive, I think. Thanks for sharing this post.