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!

Wikispaces

Justice and Peace students will be presenting information they gather for their final project on the pages of a wiki that I have just created. I've just done the explanatory home page, and though I had some trouble with the photo files, I got it done at last. I made an 18-second video just to show students that video can be included, and I made a sample link as well.

The video is made with my web cam and seems not too sharply focused. I've been reading the blog of a colleague who complains about poor production quality in some of his students' videos. I won't be expecting more of my students than I do of myself. Well, neither does my colleague, but he's much more practiced and perhaps uses better equipment.

It's a learning process for us all.