Savoonga: i-movie project

Overview
As a language Arts teacher, I recognize the benefit of using digital storytelling to motive visual learners, illustrate concepts, convey personal experiences and to make visual connections that ground real-life events in effective images.

I have been determined to familiarize myself with Mac in order to create an i-movie ever since I did a unit on Irish culture in Language Arts that culminated in an i-movie project. I was hindered, to a large extent, in helping students who struggled with technological difficulties due to my lack of exposure to Macs. I found the experience quite frustrating, as did my students, whom I referred to their peers for tech support. Due to the nature of the project and the limited time-frame, many students were more than reluctant to help their struggling peers. They experienced many technological frustrations, many of which could have been easily reconcilable had I been more apt at troubleshooting technical problems related to i-movie.

I have become accustomed to using a PC to create videos in windows movie maker, but I am determined to familiarize myself with a Mac so that I can challenge myself to complete this valuable project. Our teaching team is about to embark on an i-movie project with our advisory groups to help students reflect about their personal experiences in school this year. I hope to ensure that my previous lack of competency with i-movie is rectified through this project.

Goals:

• Familiarize myself with a specific Mac application: i-movie.
• Utilize i-movie as a means to make a culturally aware production about Alaska Native subsistence and adaptation in order to provide a model for my students.
• Raise my expectations for student productions by improving my own video-making skills.
  

Frustrations and reflections:

• Automatic Ken Burn's effect is applied to each slide, thus cutting horizontal slides, and creating unnecessary delays in production.
• End titles in i-movie run so fast that they are unreadable (not a frustration I encountered with i-movie).
• I faltered at many points in the narration, and was unsure how to splice the sound recording to delete unnecessary pauses or mistakes.
• Uploading such a huge file is proving problematic due to mega bite restrictions on certain sites.
• Overall, I'm impressed by my improvement over the course of the project, and certainly feel more adept and competent in producing an i-movie or teaching and assisting my students with their productions.

Future modifications and areas for self-improvement:

• Specify a mega bite limit for my students in the future to enable them to publish their productions on sites such as u-tube.
• Make a detailed rubric that specifies a minimum and maximum time-length.
• Produce a specific model for students before they embark on their own projects as a gauge of expectations.
• Do a series of mini-lessons before, during and post production, with the assumtions that many students are unfamiliar with the application. (Surprisingly, I found that many of them are)
• Garage band and mastering podcasts will be my next self-improvement projects.
• Familiarize myself with Pages.

View my i-movie.