Apple Digital Tools Help Students’ Voices
Be Heard

Profiles in Success: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Urbana, IL — Back when Maria Lovett made her living as a documentary filmmaker, her younger brother was procrastinating in writing a paper for a high school class. The PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) asked him what would happen if he were allowed to produce a video instead of a paper. His reply: “I’d have started it weeks ago.” In Lovett’s popular “Writing with Video” class, she’s seen the same response. Supported by Macintosh computers plus iWork and iLife software suites, Writing with Video students always have motivation to spare.

The Writing with Video course grew out of an ongoing dialogue between Lovett and Professor Joseph Squier from UIUC’s School of Art and Design. Both were attempting to define what it means to be literate in the modern world, and the role of the written and spoken word in education and normal discourse. The pair developed the class to challenge traditional perceptions of language, and to help students understand how easily the media can be manipulated. Using a combination of writing and video production, Writing with Video aims to guide students to become sophisticated media authors and consumers.

“We viewed the class as a way for students who are underserved by public education to create their own media, and address the issues that concern them most,” Lovett explains. “The class sort of lets students — particularly those of color — ‘talk back’ to the media. Also, we deal with the disconnect between students’ personal experiences and what happens in the classroom.”

Pages Powers Student Journals

Keeping detailed journals with Pages (Apple’s full-featured word processing program), students pose questions and conduct research to investigate a topic of choice, in effect becoming what Lovett calls “visual anthropologists.” Assignments incorporate reflective writing about the production process — shooting, editing, and sharing the videos. In addition, students engage in peer reviews of works-in-progress and completed projects.

Lovett’s early assignments help students build a visual vocabulary and create links between written and visual language. Each new task builds on the prior assignment, becoming progressively more complex. Lovett says the Apple technology tools provide perfect support for this process. “When you make a video, everything you’ve shot doesn’t go into the final piece. But Pages lets students throw into their journals all sorts of elements — video clips, sound files, scanned images, photos — forming a single file that can be used as visual reference. Then students can respond directly to the media. From the beginning, with reflection and self-inquiry, and progressing through the project to more community engagement, Pages is ideal.”

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