My IEP project was to learn how to integrate iMovie into a high school history class. The challenge for myself was to go from a novice iMovie operator, to a teacher of iMovie. iMovie, as it turned out, was only the beginning of my education, I also learned things like keeping three students engaged when they only use one computer, and facing the myriad of technical difficulties which occurred. Certainly the biggest leap in learning happened during this first run, but I will continue to use this project with the students and, I believe, as I work out the kinks it will become one of the student’s favorite projects. The unit lesson plans can be found here http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dcsmq5nm_2f7pqph5h&hl=en and the Unit Directions can be found here http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dcsmq5nm_3gj799mgb&hl=en.
The development of my technical expertise was impressive. My previous experience with iMovie consisted of my hasty creation of a movie after the PC program, Windows Movie Maker, melted down on my computer forcing me to switch to Mac’s iMovie. (You can find that movie here http://www.youtube.com/user/bpautzke) Errors from my first project were making the assignment historical fiction, not aligning the pictures to the audio, not being able to cut out bad audio without redoing the entire audio, and not using any cool special effects. And despite not actually using a live video in my iMovie I now know how and can include it in the project next time.
Asking freshmen history students to create a quality historical fiction story and then a movie would be too much. Having them mix fact with fiction and then have to separate it back out is mind boggling. By making them write a narrative which asks no more than to review their section of the text book made both our lives easier. I can see in the future having them create and act out a scene which would teach the other students about their topic.
Originally I struggled to understand how to do technical tasks with iMovie, such as fade the pictures in and out and use the “Ken Burns” effect. Through this project I mastered the picture overlay, with one picture melding into the next to create a seamless movie. Becoming familiar with the “photo effects” options was important to be able to assist the students. The version of iMovie in the labs was older then the version I used originally and in the old version there are two bars used to control magnification and time.
Learning how to cut the audio was a critical point, the students have such long narratives that mistakes are bound to happen. When the students made a mistake I originally had them redo their narrative because I did not know how to edit out small pieces of audio. It was actually a student who taught me how to edit the audio and with that knowledge in hand the assignment will be that much easier the second time around. Adding in extra sound effects such as marching feet is a great way to augment a movie and make it more captivating. Sound effects, audio splicing, photo fading, title making, subtitles, and efficiently bringing in photos are a few of the technical aspects of iMovie that I mastered.
Reflections: This was my favorite project of the year and after doing it once I have found, if not fixed, the bugs. The most frustrating part of the project was not the learning curve with iMovie, rather it was the difficulties with the computers in general. My students had problems with their work showing up on any computer and often had to log out and log back in on another computer numerous times before finding their work; that problem took a lot of valuable class time away from the students. Another problem was with iMovie simply not working on students computers, or iMovie freezing on an image while the audio keeps going. A problem which was overcome by the class was that not all the computers had their microphones turned on, making me think some computers microphones simply did not work. It was not until a student showed me the system preferences/ speech folder that we were able to turn all the microphones on.
I really enjoyed doing this project with the students, it was a little rushed being at the end of the year but the next time I do the project with a class I expect it to go much quicker. I liked that both the students and myself had fun with the project while learning about the French Revolution and iMovie.
No comments:
Post a Comment