App Smashing Historical Parodies

Three years ago, one of our World History teachers, Mr. Jeff Graham, Jr., approached me with an idea.  He often showed his classes historical parody videos about the topics he covered in class, but now he wanted them to make their own.  He knew what he wanted to final product to be, but he wasn't sure about the process to get there.  So we brainstormed the tools he was familiar with, plus I introduced him to a few new ones.  We are not a complete 1:1 device school, and although we allow students to BYOD, not everyone has a device to bring.  So we wanted to make the project as device agnostic as possible and accessible at both home and school.  Using Google Drive, Audacity, and iMovie/WeVideo, we were able to get students creating their own historical parodies for a culminating end of the semester project.  Mr. Graham brings his students at the beginning of each semester into the LiNK for me to go over the process.  I use a combination of a Google Slide presentation with an embedded Powtoon with all of the instructions and steps.  In order to check the progress of the projects, Mr. Graham has dates set throughout the semester for a review of the song written and the actual recording of the song before students submit the final video.  This also keeps the groups from waiting to do the entire project the week it is due.  Each year we learn what works and doesn't work, and each year the parodies get better and better.

Here is the Google Slide that I use when instructing the students. It includes examples that Mr. Graham has used to show his classes, how to download instrumental tracks from YouTube, how to record in Audacity, as well as student examples.

Historical Parody Instructions