iMovie

Really. I did not expect to spend what amounted to most of an afternoon putting together a five-minute video. But once I shot the video clips and the photos this morning, I could not keep myself away.

Because... it is fun.

I'm talking about making a movie with iMovie on the iPad. I've done a couple of videos with MovieMaker and have enjoyed that, too, which I mention just so that our associate principal doesn't think I've been converted totally to an Apple person.

The iMovie app is pretty intuitive, and my questions were mostly answered in a very helpful "help" section. What took me the longest, even though I had used iMove once before, was getting the hang of dragging the yellow circles to get fine control in my editing. I think I've got it now.

There's one of my "10 things" summer homework for teachers at my school, crossed off the list!

Explain Everything

I received a forwarded e-mail with a question about Evernote, simply because I am someone who uses Evernote, and I have researched it a bit for PD demo at our school. I don't exactly know all the ins and outs, especially with the iPad, so I looked online for the answer. The question was about sharing a link for a note, which apparently one can do on a computer but not on the iPad, where the sharing option is limited to notebooks.

So then, because one of our "assignments" this summer is to make a demonstration video with either the Explain Everything or Show Me app, I decided to get in some of my practice on the iPad by showing in a visual format what I had just learned about sharing notebooks .

I had been to a short demonstration of Explain Everything, but even if I had not, I think I still could have figured out how to use it, because it's pretty intuitive. The longest part of the process was probably taking my screenshots, but once I had my camera roll ready to go, it was a fairly quick job to pull up a shot for each slide, record and draw. The actual processing of the video took some minutes, a good time for (as suggested by the EE people) a "screen break."

I like it! Now I'll be thinking about how I can apply this application to my curriculum.