How to Create a Year End DVD For Your Class

"We didn't realize we were making memories... we just knew we were having fun." 

There are things about childhood that are just so delicate, like finding a bunch of twigs outside or laughing as you notice a toad jump its way back to the pond. Little people are just that - little. And they deserve to have their moments be valued and treasured by their families, but also very much so at school, by their teachers.

Since I have begun working with the school board, I have continued to do two things: shared documentation of children's learning via Twitter, and made a year end DVD for them to treasure forever. That is, as long as DVD's don't become obsolete in the too near future... gasp!

Capturing the joy in our students has been a passion of mine that I have shared with many teaching colleagues over the years. Luckily, each year I have been granted the opportunity to construct a DVD and I've been given so much great feedback from families and children that I want to share with other educators how it's done.

So, with that being said, I'm going to actually break it down for you in that I will show you how I organize my photos in Google Drive and how I use iMovie to put it all together.

Organize, Sort, Update

The utmost key factor I will share from the beginning is to STAY ORGANIZED. Putting together a video of the best moments from the year takes time. Precious, sweet, report card writing in June, time. Don't give up before you get started by looking at your photos on your 12 devices on the last week of school!

Before school begins or in the first weeks of starting, I always make a current year photo in my Google Drive account. So for this year, it would be called, "2018-2019". Within this folder, I have the 10 school months separated (September - June). I try to upload all of my pictures and student documentation within the week they are taken but sometimes that doesn't happen. Regardless, as soon as you want to clear out your documentation device, you have the folders ready to help you store them until you are ready to make the video! I totally recommend Google Drive or Google Photos for storing photos because it's what works for me, but you are welcome to use a different platform if that suits you better.

Once you have the media organized in your folders, you might want to take the extra step each month and delete repeated data so you aren't sorting through duplicates when you're ready to make the DVD.

For my videos, I use the Apple program iMovie.