Thing 37 Green Screen Fun

Thing 37 Green Screen Fun

I was very excited to see this thing. I have a new green screen media room in my library media center this year, and have been trying to come up with ideas for how to use it. This “thing” came at the perfect time as I’m starting with a new class for second semester.  Polly’s example with her critters looking at the northern lights was adorable, and made greenscreening sound easy! I decided to jump in.

    The first thing to do was to figure out which of the recommended apps / tools could be used on the student MacBooks that my students have access to. I logged in to one of the laptops as a student and began experimenting. I first checked Do Ink, but sadly it said it was only compatible with iPhone and iPads. (Although I may still introduce it to my son at home since he has an iPad he could try it on.) And the same held true for WeVideo.

    I decided to see what ideas there were in “You don’t need a green screen app” section, hoping I would find some MacBook friendly ideas. I started by reading the article Free & Easy Green Screen Editing – How to Make Transparent Backgrounds to see what that was all about. I was super excited to see that this worked on my MacBooks!  I watched the tutorial and practiced using the “Instant Alpha” feature in Pages and Google Drawings. So easy!! The tutorial videos were so easy to follow. I plan to use this with my 6th grade classes ASAP - they are going to love it! The first video I watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=248&v=YwZUnIzKSxw showed how to remove the background using the instant alpha tool. The video tutorial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_USxy-dwv8 explains in detail how to add backgrounds and edit the images.  Layering is also explained and everything is super simple. I’m not a photoshop person, so knowing how to do this with Pages & Google Drawings is opening up new worlds for me and what I can use my green screen for with my students. So excited!

    LEARNING ACTIVITY

Now that I knew how to use the Instant Alpha tool with Pages on my Mac, I wanted to test out how to use these features on my Dell computer. I watched the tutorial for Chromebooks and learned that Lunapic also works on my Dell desktop. I took a photo of a student who happened to be in the library at the time in front of my green screen, and followed the steps in the tutorial to successfully place her in the center of an M&M candy valentine heart. Here’s the image I created for my learning activity:

    I can’t wait to introduce this to my students, and plan to do so during our current author study project. They can greenscreen images of the book covers or other author-related pictures and use them as part of their media projects. I also loved the idea shared by Nicole Rosen for putting the students’ faces onto their favorite book covers! I might do that, too! Thanks for another awesome “thing”!