Week 5

Creating the rubric this week was a bit challenging, but rubrics always are for me. I am always trying to address any loophole a 7th grade student will find, so I feel like some of my columns/requirements are too wordy. It doesn't help that I also need to design the rubric to be able to withstand the scrutiny of helicopter parents. The bonus to the rubric is that I focused on how I could change the wiki research project my 7th grade health students currently work on and re-direct it so that they can use other tools like prezi, glogs, wikis, and even a pecha kucha. I am going to put the rubric in action with my next semester of students and hope I get some better stuff than I got with the group I currently have (my 7th grade students are rather immature this year, so they are not as able to work independently as previous groups I have had).

I enjoyed looking at the group work we had to complete because it gave me an opportunity to check out SlideSix, Author Stream, and 280 Slides. I wish I would have known about these last week! I finally got my Pecha Kucha to upload with the audio I embedded, but I had to convert it to a video first then upload it to YouTube. If I had known about one of these three applications, I may have test run them first instead of wasting my time trying to figure out how to get my audio to upload with my video.

I am happy to say I am done with my Pecha Kucha although I don't know if I am jazzed about the way it turned out. I wanted to embed soothing music in the background, but it either overwrote my voice or it overpowered it. In retrospect, I think I would have had an easier go of this assignment if I would have done it on a Mac using iMovie. I could have easily done the voice with music overlay and the interface for iMovie is so sweetly simple. I also have Magix, a video editing program for PC, but I am still learning how to use it. I tried Windows Movie Maker, but the newest version is terrible terrible terrible and does not have the nice features earlier versions have.

I was laughing when I read the info on how to buy a camcorder and all of those links with little guides. I spent hours researching equipment for my broadcast/filmmaking class and ended up choosing a Sony HD camcorder with 120GB hard drive. All reviews and recommendations were solid. However, after I spent $1400 apiece, the middle of the manual tells you that it does not provide interface for Macs (I just bought 3 for the class). One would think that piece of info could have been listed somewhere in the reviews or product information. I decided I could deal with that and only upload those cameras to the PC's. However, the PC's had a version of Adobe Premiere Pro that did not support AVCHD (the format of the HD camcorder), so we could not edit the videos from the camcorder. I had to buy a better version of Adobe ($400). Luckily, a techie at Computer World in Appleton was able to get one of my Sony camcorders to upload to the Mac (but not the other). I have learned so much this year about buying computer hardware and software!