In about eight days, students at Piedmont High School managed to write, create and edit movies about themselves. Last Wednesday, May 12, their hard work was on display at the school for family and friends to see.

The little white Macbook laptops were arranged on tables in the cafeteria as students and their families milled around watching the creations, or what they called their iMovies, named after the video editing software used to make them. The assignment was for each student to write a poem about themselves, called an “I poem” and then to turn that poem into a multimedia project with sound and images and their words.

For ninth grader Cale Chasteen making the iMovie was easy, and it helped to have completed projects on the Macbooks prior to this assignment. “After you learn how to use the computers it’s pretty easy,” said Chasteen.

More than a few of the movies contained images and words involving something about a State Championship won not long ago in Piedmont. On the screens sentences like “I see state championship rings” and “I pretend nothing” floated across photographs of boys dressed in Bulldog blue and gold.

Some of the iMovies got fairly introspective, choosing instead to focus on things like “I worry to much” and “I act like everything is okay”, but each different iMovie was a clear reflection of who made it, said ninth and tenth grade English teacher Ivan Ray. Ray said the instructors encouraged the kids to put themselves into their work.

“We really encouraged them to bring in pictures of their life. It was very successful,” said Ray. “They’ve done a great job.”

What made the iMovie assignment special, said Ray, was the fact that it would be viewed by their parents and their friends. “So many times when we’ve done research they’d publish it for me. But for this assignment moms and dads can see what they’ve done and really what they say about themselves,” said Ray. “How they feel out themselves and their friends. How they feel about their lives.”

The students made use of the school’s new Macbook laptops and a variety of software programs to put the iMovies together, blending images with music, much of which they created themselves with a program called “Garage Band”, and their poems.

Librarian and Media Specialist Paula Birch said they kids had no trouble synthesizing all of the different aspects of the technology. “I did some preliminary teaching on how to use the software, and I did some teaching on fair use,” said Burch.

Fair use is a topic that is becoming more important than ever, with so much access to copyrighted content available over the internet Burch taught the students what could be used and what could not, and how much of a song could be used without infringing on the copyright.

Farrah Holmes teaches 11th grade English and Spanish at the high school. Holmes said this assignment gave the students a chance to take what would have normally been a written portfolio and bring it into the modern digital age.

“They were really excited about it because they weren’t going to have to make one huge portfolio but they were going to have to take pictures and make a movie about themselves,” said Holmes.

“They were teaching me a lot of things,” said Suzanne Haney, a ninth and 12th grade English teacher at Piedmont. “They just jumped right in. They’re not afraid of the technology.”

Haney said she hopes the students are able to take away from the assignment not only the added knowledge of how to use all of the different aspects of making the movie and using the technology, but the value and importance of looking a little deeper into themselves, and sharing that knowledge with others. She said their assignment made them ask questions like “What do I feel, and who am I, and what do I hope, and what do I believe,” said Haney.

“Myself, seeing them every single day and working with them, when I sit down and look at their movies I learn something new about them. I gain some insight. I think if their parents look at them they’ll gain some insight too,” said Haney.

A student from each grade level had their iMovies chosen as good examples of the use of the technology and of their ability to incorporate themselves into the project. Freshman Shannon Alberse, sophomore Mariah Gowens, junior Hunter Amberson and senior Austin Grissom got to see their work displayed over a large projector for the whole assembly.