Editing Lesson

Today, October 12th, 2009, I conducted my third lesson at Jack Jouett Middle School. Today we worked on editing and finishing the video presentations. I started by arriving a few minutes early and worked on converting all videos to .wmv format just in case the codecs for flip were not installed on all of the computers in their computer lab. It appears that all went fine with this. Most students had no trouble finding their videos to use for the projects.
I began with a short run-through of the grade rubric to remind groups of their primary focus for the projects so that they would not spend too much time on the "bells and whistles" of the Windows Movie Maker software and instead focus on their digital story. I highlighted the main points of the rubric including that their story should be understandable and make sense to their audience. I also indicated that they will use this rubric to evaluate their progress in the next class so it should provide a guide to them for assembly of their final video.
I then did a short tutorial on using Movie Maker. A show of hands indicated that most students had used this program previously and so I spent only a few minutes highlighting how to cut, arrange, add effects and titles, and transitions, etc. I answered a couple of questions from students and then we were off to the computer lab.
At the lab, students were eager to work in groups on their projects. They seemed comfortable in collaborating to finish their video. Most groups had positive interactions as they clustered around the machines to view and arrange their clips. Deanine and I rotated around between groups offering help and advice to each group. We also provided some headset microphones for them to do voice-overs for some sections. One group figured out how to do slow motion and another decided to play a short piece of background music for their credit titles. As expected, this had a snowball effect on the other groups as they each wanted to add a short clip of music. This facilitated a short discussion that I led on the use of copyrighted materials and how much they could use according to "fair use". I asked them to limit their song clips to under twenty seconds to insure that they were within the ten percent copyright fair use rule.
As groups worked, a couple of them needed to re-film certain parts of their videos and so Deanine and I traded off going with these groups to help with filming as the others worked in the computer lab. It worked well and all groups seemed engaged and working. All groups completed a project, but one group was not sure if they were finished by the end of the period. We ran into one particular issue when saving. Apparently some groups only saved their projects as Movie Maker files instead of exporting them as movies. This caused some problems as that as we opened them to check them on the server, the program would lose the location of the clips and show a red X on the screen instead of the clips. We then went back and found these clips and Deanine and I worked after class to export all of these videos for backup. We also discovered that all of the groups except one had saved their narration and background music on their desktop, which was erased when they logged off, so I had to go back into their movies, remove this broken link and export their videos again. I also had to re-arrange their video clips so that the clips and their final video were in the same folder on the server. We had considered these issues previously, but I did not check carefully as each group was saving to be sure that they had followed directions exactly, so next time, I should probably have a handout or something to remind them of exactly what to do. However, this was mostly a server issue at the school and if students were saving on a hard drive, they would not have these issues.
After checking over their videos, Deanine and I decided that tomorrow I would take each group one at a time into the computer lab to review their video and add their narration or background music again since it was lost in translation. She has another assignment for them to work on while we are working. After adding their final touches to the videos, we will go back to the classroom to view and evaluate each video.
This class went very well, with groups working, asking questions, interacting with both the technology and each other. As they found various ideas that worked, they shared them with other groups. One group even wrote their own short rap song to include in their video. I look forward to finishing this project with them tomorrow.