As part of my MAET coursework I was given the challenge to create a short video that represents a theme in an abstracted way. The theme of my iVideo is “Words have weight”. I work with 14-16 year olds currently and a major shift I have seen in behavior and social norms has been the heightened awareness of the weight of my students’ online social media presence.
We spent several class discussions and free writes focused on what their social media presence means to them, whether or not a comment online hurts more or less than a face to face comment, etc. It was astounding to me how many students said that any online negative comment outweighed a mean comment face to face. This dialogue led to more discussions and research on changes in social norms due to online presence.
As a result of this realization, I wanted to present a short video reminder that words have weight and that your word choice has an impact on a person. It does not matter if it is over an information current and isn’t presented face to face, those words still can cause pain (and also joy!). So the film words have weight is a result of that thought process.
I also wanted to represent it in a way that you could feel the weight of the words without it being too negative. It was definitely important that their was an empathetic and realistic element to the message as well. That’s why I included negative and positive phrases that my classmates had been told over the course of their lives and asked them to write and hold those words to add to the video.
I wanted to shift from the negative to the positive wording at the beginning and end of the film and to highlight that I also changed the background of my text from black to white at the end of the process. I hope that by the end of the video the message is clear: words have weight.
technology and ela 