Digital Story

This week and last I spent a lot of my time creating a movie for class. I used picture I took at home in Philadelphia to create a video of a tour of Philadelphia. Doing this project took time, but I really enjoyed doing it. I think I learned a lot during this project. First I learned the benefit of choosing a topic I am highly interested in. I was very excited to make a video of Philadelphia and show classmates my hometown. I think I worked harder on this assignment because I felt more invested in this. This is something I should keep in mind while I am teaching. If I am able to give my students my freedom on topics during assignments, they may feel as I did during this project and work harder. By providing choices to my students, they feel involved and engaged in the assignment. This isn't something that I will be able to do all the time, but when it is possible I should.

Next I learned about two video creating programs. First I began by using iMovie on a Mac. The program gave me trouble at first, but it become easier to use as I got the hang of it. What I really did not like about iMovie was I could not save it and work on it at another computer. This meant I would have to go to the computer in class anytime I wanted to edit the video. I decided that this was not good for me because I wanted to really take my time with it and work on it more at my leisure. Since I have a PC, I began to use Windows Live Movie Maker to do the video. It was a change so I had to spend some time learning it, but the program was very easy to use as well. I really enjoyed how easy it was to save to my computer multiple time. I liked this because if I want to see what my movie would look like if I completed changed an aspect I was able to save it, make the change, and then just reload the saved one if the changed wasn't something I liked. This saved me time when trying new things with the program.

The last thing I learned was the benefit of taking my own digital photographs. It took me time to gather the photos I took, but since it was something I was interested in I had fun doing so. Once I had my photos, I was free to use them and did not have to worry about copy write issues. I could use,adjust, or edit the pictures however I wanted. I also used one of these pictures to edit using Pixlr and it was fun to change a picture I actually took. This again teaches me that in my class if I want student to do work with photos, I should allow students to take the pictures themselves if this is an option. It makes them feel more invested in the assignment.