Blog #7-New Tool for this Teacher's Shed!

During this course, I've acquired a number of good tools to help me enhance my teaching and hopefully my students' experience in my future classes. I would say my favorite would be having a better handle on iMovie, with knowledge of using Prezi coming in at a close second place. I have to admit, three plus years after having made the transition from PC to Mac, I still hadn't bothered to delve into the program at any depth-that is until this past weekend. The movie unit in this course has forced me to open the program up and have a go. And well, I love it! Here are a couple reasons why:

1. It's so easy!

I never realized how simple it could be to make a relatively high quality looking video. Whether involved in some sort of music video or the like, I've always just left the video 'stuff' to the video 'people'. However, with just a few hours of tinkering, and simply dragging clips into the timeline, I saw what was the beginning of a piece of video I might actually be proud to say I took part in making.

2. From, "Ah, I dunno." , to , " It looks pro!"

Well, maybe not 'pro', but the editing features in iMovie are ridiculously cool for a first-timer. Sure, at some point after using iMovie on numerous projects one might want to take the leap to something more comprehensive and in-depth like Final Cut Pro, for example. But for hobbyists, or teachers and students in this case, iMovie can't really be beat. Lori, my partner, and I were amazed with the results, even from the beginning of the editing process for our little vid. We took 28 minutes of footage from her camera and condensed it into a pretty decent looking 4 minutes.

I will more than likely be asking my students to create their own videos in the future. For an ESL class, it could be particularly fun and useful, taking something like role-play to a whole other level. What's more is that I could easily brief my students on the basics of iMovie (I hear Windows Movie Maker is very similar in its ease of use, and would almost certainly be what most of my class would be using due to the lack of Macs at my school, and the majority of Korean students having PCs at home). If I can do it, my students should have no problem. I'm looking forward to incorporating video-making into my future classes.