• •
Student crews videotaped each other using wireless microphones, an audio mixer and a camcorder. (tech ding!)
Each taping crew consisted of two students who were responsible for teaching the next pair of students how to operate the camera and audio mixer. (collaboration ding!)(ding!) But training degraded during the project and audio was not perfect. (experience ding!)
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As the one with the most “unfettered/unstructured” time, and the tech savvy to do it, I was the editor. (Tech directors—what do they do anyhow?) So using Movie Maker I downloaded all the clips and posted them onto our Moodle site. (Boo! No Dings)
• • • •
Once clips were on the site, students went to the computer lab, pulled up the clips they were assigned to critique and used the rubric to do so. (ding! )(ding!)
After the clips were evaluated and grades given all around, the next step was to assign each two member team to write another voice track for one of the clips. (creativity ding! )( fun ding!)
Back in the computer lab, clips were viewed and translated (content ding!) and scripts were written. (content ding!)
The key to creating successful voiceover files was to use a voice recorder which creates “.wav” files. Kids watched the clips while speaking into the recorder, working to lip sync their own track to the clip…in Spanish… (ding!) (ding!) (ding!)
•
These files were then attached to the video clips in Movie Maker second audio track where the original sound track is turned off. Again, as the editor, I clipped the audio files into the video clips and posted the clips onto Moodle as .wmv files. (Big boo! No dings)
• •
These final redubbed clips were posted on Moodle (again no dings- done by tech director) and evaluated by students. (ding)
Post tests were given resulting in a significant improvement over previous years’ units. (the ding that really counts)
MACULJOURNAL |
Project Rationale: Lots of tech around, but how much to use and what to expect? Dr. Jason Ohler (
www.jasonOhler.com) presents a process he calls “New Media Narrative.” I attended one of his sessions and was captivated. His basic premise is that for all the new media available to us as media creators, what really drives a successful project is the story. To put it another way, “content is still king.”
Dr. Ohler’s 80/20 axiom of technology production helped us guide this project. As I understood him:
• •
80% of the project (the content) can be produced in 20% of the total project time needed to create a digital story telling project.
So, the remaining 20% of the project, fully polished and creatively finished with the technological tweaks, bells, whistles, transitions, voiceovers, and “flash and splash,” depending on the project creator, can actually take up to 80% of the total project time.
Quality products and processes in 20% of the time? This is something I could sell to my teachers! And who was first on my list? Mrs. Roxanne Stanek.
We applied this basic idea to our project and expected that our videos would not be “polished” by today’s technical standards. Realistically, we couldn’t have our students polish and tweak because of time constraints in the daily schedule. The baby steps of this project would grow to tech leaps in others.
Details and Observations Movie Maker II for Windows XP is capable of creating moderately sophisticated videos. Like many in education, we use it because it is free. We didn’t expect to produce a high quality video. We were after higher quality audio. So our MACUL grant funds purchased two wireless microphones, a wireless receiver,
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