I don't have any experience with Naked Vegas however from what I've been able to find, it's a pretty clunky book. Screenshots are pretty poor and don't really deal much with the subject matter as well as other books.

Instant Vegas is a great book to get people up and running. Anything Vegas from VASST is worth adding to the reference library for your students.

As for curriculum, I haven't run an advanced class yet. Will be doing that next year but also incorporating Avid and FCP so not sure what my game plan will be.

For beginning though, I had the kids watch a couple of movies that were Academy Award winners for editing. Had them pay attention to how the movie was assembled. We then watched a few scenes for edit points and turned off the audio to see how it flowed visually.

I then broke them into groups of two and had them watch a film (we've got edit bays so they did this in each bay) and then pick a compelling scene, then break it down in length, amount of edits and anything that really stood out such as sound, dialogue, fx....

Then we moved into Vegas once I felt they had an artistic and aesthetic grasp of the concept of editing...

The tutorial under Vegas 3 downloads is a stellar beginning tute that works well to get people up to speed.

I then put together a bunch of media and had the kids do a faux news commercial building on what they had done.

Then, onto a commercial for the high school I teach at

Lastly, I had the kids cut a scene from a 35mm short film based on just the script. After each group was done, we watched and discussed the actual film and why it was done the way it was done.

Mind you this was all done in 6 weeks, 2 hours a day.

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me at mike at easthollywood dot org for more info.

Mike