Assignment #5

I'll be honest with you, I was terrified for this assignment. I have never made a movie before, and until the PowerPoint assignment I also had never worked with sound clips. Making an audio file and getting it to match with images sounded so difficult to me. Luckily Dr. Romano was correct in that Windows Movie Maker is a user friendly program.

So I read some tutorials online and watched some step-by-step video instructions to get an idea of how to make it. Then it was my mission to figure out what I could make a movie about! I finally settled on amniotic eggs because it was a concept that several of my students struggled with this past year. They had a hard time learning the membrane names and their functions so I thought this would be useful to have to show them and since it is posted on the internet they can view it whenever they need review.

Once I picked my topic, I wrote out what I was going to say. From there I looked for images that would match my main ideas. I then recorded my audio using my digital camera. I wasn't exactly sure if it would work but it ended up coming out clear.
Looking back there were just a few small changes I would have done. I entered my graphics, added my audio, set the frames to match the audio, then tried to add transitions between the slides. Next time I will definitely add transitions before matching the timing between my audio and visual. When I tried to go back and add them after it really messed up my timing and I had a difficult time getting it to flow.

My only other complication was saving the file. I am so used to going to File --> Save As and having that work. However, I learned with this project that if you do that it only saves it as a project, not as a movie. There were some additional steps I had to go back to and then I could save it as a movie to my computer. Once that was done uploading it to TeacherTube was a breeze.

My video can be found at: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=5520709f86320185c5e1 or you can watch it by clicking play below:



Overall, this assignment was a pleasant surprise! I had a lot of fun and I know my students would love to do something like this also. I think this is something that is very do-able for high school students and I think some kids would get very into it and probably even blow my video out of the water! I am excited to give my students this option for their next major project and I can't wait to see what they come up with!