An Oasis of Technology, a Collaboration of Peers

No doubt the experience of multimedia technology is a new one for me. I have viewed many YouTube videos in awe of the bad and creative. I have heard numerous podcasts, but until this course, I have never created my own. As I reflect on the learning process, I review the collaboration that our team had to use. We had to move past simple cooperation.

Teamwork:

It seemed easy at first when we passed out job duties and discussed the beginnings of a vision. Immediately three of us stood up and took a form of leadership role. Lucinda created a team wiki so that we could post and share files and other information. Christine immediately began creating a shot list, and I took over as director and screenwriter. Jose added images from his work in Mexico classrooms to our collection of media, and Lamar certainly acted as the creative backbone to the group by completing the final video. Elements from each of us can be found in the video, but I think that ultimately the video represents the students we teach.

Our group decided during our second week of team work, that each of us would create our own version of the public service announcement, then vote on whose would represent the group. Let me tell you that in my opinion everyone did a great job, but Lamar took the script and the story, and made it magical. Posted above you will see the final team product, but below you can see my good, but not as good version. You can see all our group member's versions on our team wiki.

The only thing I found that I truly struggled with was the wait time. While some in our group seemed particularly interested in moving quickly through the assignment, there were some who seemed to push the deadlines the group set. We faced trials due to communication, though we all ended up with Skype for conferencing together in the end. Group members, including myself, ended up sick at some point forcing minor delays, but delays just the same. Although, our team worked well together, I know some of us feel we did much more than others.

A little about the story:

When Lucinda, Christine, and I net at our first Skype call, we immediately leaned toward a story about the needs of 21st century learners. Of course the first video that came to mind is one that most of us in the world of technology education are familiar with "A Vision of K-12 Students Today". We liked the overall idea of the video and the message it sends, but we had to limit our video to a 30-60 second bit. We also knew that there were elements that we needed in our video that were not a part of the vision video. I joked about how my classroom at school is a technology desert. I have a TV, a projector (old school style), a computer projector, and a teacher only desktop computer. I also pointed out that I had the opportunity to teach and see teachers teach who have a classroom oasis (Clickers, Interactive Whiteboards, Laptops, etc). Lucinda and Christine discussed their experiences too, and we decided to utilize the Texas Long-Range Plan for Technology as our video base. We like the imagery that could be created with the desert versus the oasis.

As I finalize my reflection, I feel that we did our job. I hope that will it does not have a call to action line in the script, that the story, the imagery, the students, will send our audience to action to make all classrooms and oasis of technology!

Week 4 work with my PSA team

Other than the opportunity to learn more about sound and the use of audacity, it has been a busy week for my team. We have made a lot of leaps and bounds. As a team we conference often on skype. In a meeting previously this past week we decided that all group members would do their own version of the PSA. In doing so we figured that we would all learn more about editing through audacity and our movie makers. We also decided that we could possibly end up with a better product than the original vision.

Here is our updated pre-production plans and the link to our team wiki. We update the wiki constantly!
http://edld5363psagroup.wikispaces.com/

Web-Conference on 9-17-10 at 5:00pm

Technical problems seem to longer be an issue in conferencing, at least on my side. Thank you Skype for practice with my camera and mic!

On the other hand, I can't help but express some concern in the changing of the assignments while we are in the process of completing them. My group was so close to finishing our project. Then tonight I find out that we have to have 2 voices for our narration. While this is not a bad thing overall, it was not in our original script. In my understanding of the rubric for weeks 3-5 we needed at least 2 video elements and an added audio such as narration. In requiring two or more voices now, my group must essentially rethink some elements of the script. I wrote the script for one speaker, one voice. It is a narration-kind of like the voice over on the St. Jude's commercials. We planned other vocals in the interviews, but have to cut much if not all of that.

I am also a little frustrated with the constant post and repost and post here and there requirement. In 5306 it was one thing. We were learning the many different places that you can post or write information. Now it is just a overkill of web 2.0. For instance, I am not a blogger, I don't even like to journal. Thought I do like my wiki, and have even started posting things that I do at school both for my internhip plan and outside of it, I don't want to double and triple post everything. I also dislike the fact that in a group project everyone must post everything several times. It sounds like wasted effort if you are planning that it is someone's job to do that part, then someone else takes care of the other product(s) of the project.

Finally, I am really irratated with the TK20 information. I understand that our professors did not necessarily choose to use this new program, but why are we going to have to pay $100 for an online portfolio when that is the intent of this blog and my wiki? Why not use the ProjectShare software which is already free as well. I apologize to Dr. A and the other professors if this subject is hitting a sore spot, but it is rough as well for all of us who are already professional educators, with portfolios and experience.

I hate to be on a soapbox rant, but it seems that we have moved beyond minor adjustments to the coursework and just simple continue to add tasks and extra items to purchase for the sake of adding it.

I have to say I appreciate the fact that I have the opportunity to take these courses. I have already integrated parts of my course work into my classes. I have presented to the board the need for a better infrastructure, and had reasonable back-up not just empty requests. I have started to help train other teachers at school to use various technology tools and online softwares.

Certainly not everything happening is bad, just not pleasant.

Adventures in iMovie...The New Film Experience

As in all adventures, I started trying to create this amazing video that I wanted to call the Rhetoric Remix...I had high expectations and wanted so much for it to work. My downfall, trying to use downloaded video from the Internet on Movie Maker. I tried several times to edit my clips and piece them together, but each time I managed to edit my program would freeze and reload losing all work. After an hour of redoing the same cut over and over, I just gave up!

Now this is not a plug for Mac or a soap box about the perils of PC, but I truly believe there are some things easier done Mac. Videos are easier on Mac. Generally speaking I have used PC for its accessibility and general ease of use. Playing with the sample video clips on Movie Maker was easy and there are a lot of different effects as well as transitions. Here's the downside. Movie Maker does not accept a lot of downloaded video clips for editing. So forget the whole create your own video from YouTube videos. Cutting videos is also a little rough as you have to keep a close eye on the time in order to choose the start and stop times. Finally there is a limited number of title choices that are really limited to font style and size.

iMovie for Mac seems to be a lot simpler to use from the start. All videos that have been loaded onto the Mac are in the work area immediately under the story board and view screen. You can either choose to drag and drop an entire video clip to the story board or you can pre-cut from the import screen. Adding extras such as blank screens, titles, photos, and music is no problem on the insert menu. Everything is drag and drop. Like MovieMaker, I will use the MPEG4 file format for my video in iMovie. This allows the video to be played on both QuickTime and MediaPlayer.

Now, I'll be honest. I did not view any iMovie tutorials until after I had posted my video on YouTube. I did go back and view the tutorial that comes on the Mac, and lets just say it was easy to learn without the tutorial and even easier with the tutorial. I did a search for iMovie tutorials on Google and YouTube, and to my disappointment the videos were all done by kids! Well, maybe it is not disappointing...these kids were doing some neat things with iMovie. I just couldn't listen to them for very long. I sometimes over analyze the presentation of others...that's the speech teacher in me.

At this point, I know that my preference has changed to Mac for media related products. I prefer iPhoto to PhotoStory, iMovie to MovieMaker, and iTunes to MediaPlayer. I have truly been insired after my daughter's dance to her video to continue learning to use iMovie to create family movies from our camcorder.