Irving students use video skills to document school during a pandemic

No one will forget what it was like to attend school during a pandemic. But Madison Granger’s eighth-grade English students will have video proof of their lives at Irving Middle School.

Granger’s students recently completed a week-and-a-half project in which they created mini-documentaries about school during a pandemic. They interviewed other students, Irving staff and family members, then combined those interviews with other video footage and still images.

Granger said her students typically complete a unit on mini-documentaries, but by producing their own it gave both in-person and remote learners an opportunity to better show what they learned.

“I think it will be cool to have the memory of documenting it,” she said. “I hope they realize this is a more contemporary mode of getting information out there and that yes, we can get tons of knowledge from reading books but with technology there are other ways we can communicate information, as well.”

One of the students, Maizie, said she learned a lot from the project.

“I thought it was really fun to show how the school has made changes to accommodate for our safety, like how the water fountains are closed now and how we are staying socially distanced,” she said.

Carolyn, her partner for the project, agreed and said it was interesting to hear people’s different perspectives.

“Some people talked about financial struggles for people, some people talked about sanitizing - we really learned a lot from the other people,” she said, later adding, “Now we think it’s interesting but it’s just our everyday life. But in 50 years or 20 years we’ll be like, Whoa, that really happened.”

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