At the end of last week we finished creating a project with the software Inspiration. This application quickly became one of my favorites as it was easy to use and self-explanatory. No headaches, no frustration...just simple creation. As a future teacher I can absolutely see myself using this type of program to create visual maps or graphic organizers for my students. The particular topic that I chooses for the class assignment was to make a representation of the different layers of the Earth. After completing this assignment, I found myself wishing that such a program had existed when I was in elementary school. I have always been the type of person that I have to see it to understand it. Simply hearing a teacher lecture on a topic was never enough for me to fully comprehend it, and I always had to have something written down for me to read or have the concept drawn/mapped out. For ideas that are more abstract I can imagine that my future students will benefit from this type of program.
The joy that I experienced with Inspiration was quickly squashed in today's class as we began to work with iMovie. The commercial for this program, of a young boy creating a movie easily and swiftly is a joke. I have now been playing with this application for over an hour and a half and I am about to pull my hair out! I try to add a title to a photo and sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. When I go to play through my movie, it decides whether or not it wants to work. Forget about trying to format any of the titles you want to come up for each photo...it's not worth the headache. And when I try to make each photo the same length, it all but deletes the preceeding picture. What a nightmare. So much for the ease of using this program! This is definitely one that I will stay away from as long as I can.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi, Amy,
ReplyDeleteIt's important not to let our frustration with a particular tool or application squash our ability to appreciate its instructional value. The point to be remembered here is that there are *numerous* desktop and web-based applications to support nonlinquistic representation. When you are in the classroom, and you see a need to break down a complex idea visually to help your students "get it," will you have the means and the know-how to do it? Of course, you will! iMovie is just one avenue by which you might reach that instructional objective.
All applications aside, remember that even simple images that you collect and incorporate into instruction may help a visual learner in your classroom. And it is possible to get hands-on with multimedia production in the elementary classroom without ever using iMovie, MovieMaker, Final Cuts Pro, etc. There are so many options -- VoiceThread, Inspiration, Webspiration, even PowerPoint! Too many for us to explore in our short class, but I hope your imagination has been sparked.
Amy, I agree with your frustration!!! I think part of the frustration is that we have limited time and we will be graded on our final product. I think, as teachers, we would take ample time to learn the application before we utilized it in the classroom. Microsoft Movie Maker is so much simpler with a lot more options!! Cathy
ReplyDelete