Thoughts from a Five Year Old

Today I grabbed my iPhone and did an experiment.  (It was also and excuse to play with paper airplanes.)  I wanted to see what kind of journaling I could do with a five year old (my son).  Fifteen minutes of filming, fifteen minutes of editing, and fifteen minutes of uploading later we were done.  I did everything on my iPhone 4 (but it also would have worked fine on an iPod touch).  The editing and commentary was done using the iMovie app on my phone.

Someplace during one of my many conferences and PD events I heard a speaker talking about video science reports.  The speaker was playing with middle years lap reports.  The students recorded their conclusions in a video instead of a written report.  Their work averaged about two grade levels higher.  The written report was a barrier to their learning.  (No I can't remember who or where it was - if you know please let me know.)

My goal was to see what we could do with a primary student.  I am quite happy with the results.  Tristan looked at the pictures and talked about them with very little prompting.  (Yes I did bribe him with another airplane.)  I left most of the prompting in the video.  The intent was to see what I could create with very little time and effort.  It is not meant to be an award winning documentary - just a quick record of what went on.  I think that there is huge value in projects like this.  Often in the primary grades journaling consists of drawing a picture to describe what you did.  Isn't a video like this more valuable?  With young students an adult would need to do most of the work but I am sure that Grade 3 students could run iMovie and create the same video (after some lessons of course).

Yay - Some success!

The Mac Loses

So I finally got to play a little bit with one of our school's Mac laptops (apparently everyone else shares as poorly as I do). I figured that I would try to create a time lapse video just like I did in Windows Movie Maker (see the post here). There were a significant number of swears, throwing things, curses, threats, and finally tears before I finally got Windows Movie Maker to work - but iMovie still lost.

DISCLAIMER - (Stuff the Lawyer made me put in)
I am not a Mac user. This is the first significant experience I have ever had with a Mac. I don't really know how to use them. But I did approach the project with an open mind.

I had guides up on the screen (of my PC that is). I pressed buttons. I slid sliders. I attempted to right click. I read help guides. Then I gave up. I was unable to create a time lapse video with iMovie. I did not find iMovie to be as intuitive as I expected. Windows Movie Maker made more sense to me. This might be because I am unfamiliar with Macs but I had never really used Windows Movie Maker before either.

The good thing about the Mac? No cussing and swearing (I did try this in school with little ears around). That and it never crashed.