I have never attempted to make or edit a movie before in my life.

There was something about all the moving parts that deterred me from ever trying, despite always having iMovie on my computer. Last week in class, I discovered that its not all that hard and its actually pretty fun! I came home from this class thinking of all the videos I have saved on my phone (that I never look at) and what I could do to make them into something I would watch and share. I also left wondering about how iMovie can be used in the classroom.

Once I got home, away from the computer lab on campus and stuck with my ancient (2011) Macbook Air, I began to run into problems. I don’t want to go into the details of my frustrating Mac-updating experiences, so I will just leave it as: iMovie was not on my computer and the app store version was too new to download. I tried some savvy internet maneuvers and was left empty handed. I don’t deter easily, so I turned to my trusty iPhone! After some more maneuvering, I finally had access to iMovie.

It always seems impossible until its done.

Nelson Mandela

This little journey has taught me that I shouldn’t assume that schools/students have the software. There are probably other movie making apps and programs, but it would be unfair to assign a video project without knowing that all the students have the opportunity to partake. This could be solved by making a video assignment optional, or by working with the tech I know the school has.

the app was slightly different than the computer version of iMovie, and I found it clumsy to use on my tiny phone screen, but I still managed to produce something I am proud of. Working with some videos of my own, I played around with clipping the ends, stitching videos together, removing the sound, adding music, and speeding up/slowing down the action. It was surprisingly intuitive! As we talked about in class, I think it would be easy to teach students how to do these few simple things and, lets face it, a lot of them probably already know how. This opens up the possibility of letting students produce a video for an assignment. I am pretty old-school when it comes to my expectations of students, but I am opening up to the potential different forms of texts (like videos) could have in my teaching/assessment of students. There are different skills at play when making a video for an assignment, rather than an essay/written report, but many of the content foundations and curricular competencies can be met using videos.

Here is my end product