Local Action Video Showcase Can Highlight Your School

April 20th, 2010 by Matt

Is your school doing its part to help your local river, stream, or the Chesapeake Bay? Is your school restoring a shoreline, replacing a parking lot with porous pavement, planting rain gardens, holding cleanups or doing other restoration work to protect your local waterways? Show the Chesapeake Bay Program in it’s first-ever Local Action Video Showcase!

Have your classes grab a camera and shoot a short video that shows what you’re doing at your school to help your local waterway or the Chesapeake Bay. The video submissions will be compiled to create a collective video that highlights all the local work being done throughout the Bay watershed – from New York to Virginia, West Virginia to Delaware.

The collective video will be shown to representatives and elected officials from throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed during the annual Chesapeake Executive Council meeting on June 3. The Chesapeake Executive Council includes Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty.

What you need to do:
Film a short (5 minutes or less) video showing how you or your group is helping the Bay or your local stream or river.

Make sure to begin your video by:
1.) Introducing yourself and describing where you are located,
2.) Name the local waterway you are working to protect.

Then show examples of what you’re doing in your community. Have fun with this part – do something interesting or creative. Here’s some other tips to help guide the creation of your video:

  • Make sure to get shots of people interacting with the environment
  • Feel free to interview active participants
  • Don’t include any background music – they’ll add that in for the collaborative video
  • You don’t need a fancy camera to make your video – a point-and-shoot camera or other small handheld video camera will do fine.

Check out this sample video for more ideas on what to include in your video.

Send a DVD of your video by May 14, 2010 to:

Chesapeake Bay Program
Local Action Video Showcase
410 Severn Avenue, Suite 109
Annapolis, Md. 21403

Get out there and start filming!!!

This post was adapted from the BayBlog.

Filed under: News
Tags:
Matt Rath is Multimedia Specialist for the Chesapeake Bay Program. Producing videos, photos, and other web content for the Program and our partners.

Using Audiovisuals to Promote Conservation Education

April 5th, 2010 by Liana
Photo Credit: Arkive

Photo Credit: Arkive

As an educator, have you ever been frustrated trying to find quality images and films of wildlife to use in the classroom? Have your students had difficulty searching the internet for scientifically-authenticated biological information of plants and animals to use in homework assignments or projects? Do you wish there was one central website that had both thousands of films and images and biological fact files for the Earth’s most threatened species to use in formal education? Well, look no further!

ARKive, an initiative of the nonprofit Wildscreen, is a unique global initiative gathering together the very best films and photographs of the world’s threatened species into one centralized digital library creating a stunning audio-visual record of life on Earth. Free to all at www.arkive.org, ARKive is an especially valuable educational resource as teachers have unprecedented access to every film and photograph to supplement education in the classroom.

With over 45,000 images and 6,000 films cataloguing over 6,500 species, ARKive invites website visitors to come face-to-face with not only species threatened with extinction across the globe but also those right in your backyard in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. For example, check out the Piping plover species page and the image of a mother plover incubating her eggs. The accompanying biological fact file details the plover’s range and habitat and threats to the population and by clicking on the Listen to this species link on the bottom left, our friends at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have provided an audio recording of a plover song so your students can not only see and learn about this species but even hear it!

Here’s a link to other Chesapeake Bay watershed species on ARKive:

  1. Bald Eagle
  2. Peregrine Falcon
  3. Virginia round-leaf birch
  4. Puritan tiger beetle
  5. Shortnose sturgeon
  6. Indiana bat
  7. Diamondback terrapin
  8. Bog turtle
  9. Green turtle
  10. Hawksbill turtle
  11. Leatherback turtle
  12. Loggerhead turtle
Filed under: Teaching Resources
Tags: , ,
Liana Vitali is the Program Coordinator at Wildscreen USA which is spearheading US efforts in support of ARKive. Please email info@wildscreenusa.org with any comments or questions.