Value of Web Conferences in Online Education

I have not been able to attend a web conference yet during this course, but I have attended them for past courses. I have also watched one of the recorded conferences to gain some clarity on our week 2 assignment. I am glad that we have web conferences because as an online class, we would have absolutely no communications with our professors without them. This is critical because I have found that one of the weaknesses of taking my degree online is the amount of miscommuncation that can occur. I have found through the several courses I have taken that professors will often feel that they are giving clear simple directions, but many of my classmates as well as myself are very confused as to what to do. I think that comes from the fact that there is no face to face contact with our professors, so it is harder to get quick feedback for clarification. I communicate with many of my classmates through facebook and wikis and we are constantly trying to figure out what is expected of us in the program. Sometimes the technical difficulties are frustrating, but that is to be expected with technology.

Windows Movie Maker... it's no iMovie

My group decided to look at Windows Movie Maker and iMovie partly they seem to be the most used video editing applications in education and partly because one of our readings this week specifically mentioned them as being two of the best free video editing options available. Since I have already used iMovie many times, I decided to review and evaluate Movie Maker so that I could get exposed to a different program. Windows Movie Maker comes free with PC’s that use Microsoft Windows XP or Vista or can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website. It cannot be used with Windows 7 that comes with its own video editor called Windows Live MovieMaker . For a free video editing software, Windows Movie Maker has some great basic functions, however, its “bells and whistles” are few and there are some drawbacks to the interface that it uses. Importing Options for importing are video straight from your video camera, video from a file on your computer, pictures or audio. Video formats that can be imported are limited to .asf, .avi, .dvr-ms, .m1v, .mp2, .mp2v, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .mpv2, .wm, and .wmv. This means that MP4s and .mov files will need to be converted before they can be used in the software. Editing Once you have added your media to your project, adding clips to your movie is as easy as dragging and dropping. Clips can be viewed in the preview screen at the right as they are edited. Movie Maker has several effects and transitions that you can add to customize your video. The one drawback that I found as I was adding effects to my video is that they are added to entire clips. The only way to use an effect for only part of a clip requires splitting the clip into two clips. The same is true for cutting a clip. You can cut the beginning or end of a clip, but to cut material from the middle of a clip you need to split the clip. This can get cumbersome if you have several internal clips to make. You can also add titles and credits to your video as well. For each addition you can choose the font, color and effect of your title. You can also add music or audio files to your movie as well. However, you can only control volume for the entire length of the audio or music file. There is a fade in or fade out option, but other than that, you are stuck with one level of sound for the entire selection. Unlike programs like iMovie, however there are no royalty free music or sound effect options included in the software. Publishing There are four publishing options with Windows Movie Maker. Publishing to your computer, recording to a recordable CD, sending it in an email or sending it to your digital video camera. There is no way to record a DVD in the software. A separate program will need to be used to create a DVD. You have two formats that you can publish your file in, AVI and WMV. Overall, considering that students can easily obtain it for free and that it has all of the basic editing tools needed for most student projects, Movie Maker is a good choice for classroom use. However, I would recommend that if iMovie is available at your school that it be considered. It is a program that I have used extensively in my classes. It has all of the features of Movie Maker but it also includes an easier interface for trimming and editing clips, as well as more title choices and royalty free music and sound effects. We are luck at our school to have access to both PCs and a mac laptop lab so I think that if I have my students make their own videos, I am going to use iMovie myself. Microsoft. (2010, 09 05). Create home movies with windows movie maker. Retrieved 09 05, 2010, from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx

Adding Sound Effects to iMovie tutorial

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Telling My Story

The process of coming up with my personal digital story this week was not an easy one. Beyond the fact that it was the first week back at school, and that it took awhile to find group members to work with, trying to find the story I wanted to tell was difficult for me. Reading the Digital Story Cookbook by Joe Lambert helped me the most in the process. That was the point when I really started to come up with some ideas. It was when I read his list of ideas for stories that I decided to tell a Memorial story about my Dad. Now, my Dad isn't dead, but I still believe that the person he is deserves to be honored. Next, I needed to find pictures to illustrate my story. I used the creative commons search through Flickr to find the ones that I didn't take myself. It was easy to give credit to the photographers by adding credits to the end of my movie. I used iMovie to create my digital story. I have used this software several times before, so I feel comfortable using it. I decided not to use any music because I didn't it to feel overly processed. In the end I had to cut out about a minute of material because it was too long for the assignment.

My Story