If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what’s a video worth? I think when you’re trying to engage middle school students in a review about how to use the school library, a video example is priceless. If you’re able to get their classmates to be the actors in your little library drama, all the better! The following clip is one of several filmed for this year’s library orientation. Our students, and even the teachers, got a chuckle out of it and it spurred a lively discussion about how to properly return a book to the shelf.

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I just recently received a FLIP video camcorder!  (…for my birthday – Woo Hoo!)  It was so fun to annoy my pets with it and I got some great footage of my cat yawning and my dog being needy. The FLIP is so simple that it doesn’t seem very “techie”.  The video is better quality than you’d expect, though, and I’m told it does extremely well in low light conditions.

I brought it to school and created a little FLIP video of a class of 6th graders, selecting and checking out books.  Importing the FLIP video to my computer was very simple.  I attached the FLIP to my laptop via the USB port, downloaded the FLIP software from the FLIP itself, and imported my videos.  The FLIP software allows for renaming and editing the videos, as well as creating a snapshot or still from the video.  Very cool.

I made the following iMovie from two video clips imported from my FLIP.  NOTE:  I am clearly a rookie filmmaker but want to point out that my filming of the students from the chins down was intentional.  I didn’t want them to “strike a pose”.  They did a fairly good job of ignoring me…
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I just completed my second iMovie.  I think I mentioned my first iMovie in a previous post but didn’t go into much detail.  There’s a reason for that.  I wasn’t particularly happy with the results of that first attempt.  It was an overambitious venture with a tight deadline.  I wasn’t familiar enough with the editing features in iMovie (even though it’s quite user-friendly) and the movie ended up being longer than I would’ve liked.  Having said that, it was very well received and I got lots of compliments on it.  Isn’t this stuff great?  Looks fantastic even when you know it’s not.

I feel much better about my second iMovie.  It’s a very fast-paced summary of our Tech Camp experience this summer.  I was able to find answers to the many questions that arose during my first iMovie experience and this iMovie creation went much smoother.  Once I finished and pronounced that this imovie was good… …enough, I still noticed a couple of small things I’d change if I had the energy and inclination to dive back into it.  I don’t have either… but I’ll make note of these improvements and will incorporate them next time.

I think the lesson here is that even if you encounter problems when you try new applications, keep working and asking questions.  You keep learning and it gets easier and more rewarding.