Enhanced Podcast

Our final project was to design a short enhanced podcast in iMovie. Overall I found this project to be much more challenging than anticipated. I am not a Mac user so this one one hurdle for me, even the delete key works differently on a Mac. iMovie is fairly intuitive but as with any complex program there is, or at least was in my case, a pretty steep learning curve. Among the many pitfalls I encountered were accidentally deleting an audio track, entering captions that did not save, not understanding why some recorded voice-over followed with a specific image while  other voice-overs the recording continued until stopped, and figuring out how to easily preview segments of the video without watching the whole thing from the start. I met most of these challenges, but not without a fair amount of effort. I will let you be the judge of how successful I was.

In order for me to have a movie making assignment in my classroom, I would need to watch many more instructional videos and practice making a few more movies. I encountered frustrations and I expect that some of my students would struggle with many more. Of course, others would do much better right from the start. I could an iMovie as a project to follow one in which students prepared  a PowerPoint presentation and another that required a screen-cast. The PowerPoint would help establish the concept of and practice with planning a presentation. The screen-cast would provide them practice with narration. A movie combines the two. I could also simplify the project a bit by having students use pictures that they had already take of friends,  family, etc., and make it more a video to tell about themselves rather than on some more complicated topic.