Project 3

Project 3 was to create a movie in iMovie that taught the students more than they would normally have learned through either reading or normal lecture. This was a cool project (I seem to say that about all of them). Like any project though, it had some difficult parts. Initially I started the project in Windows Live Movie Maker on my personal laptop. It's a great tool as well, but the computers in the lab here at school were literally 13 versions behind. Wow. There was no way I could work on the project here at school durring the class we were supposed to work on it. I started using iMovie durring class, and was able to complete it durring our normal class time. The most difficult part of the project was citing the things I used in my video. Citing an image of a newspaper found on the internet is ridiculously confusing. I even bought the MLA handbook, and it couldn't really help me that much. Citing my references actually took longer than creating the actual video, but as a future English teacher, I figured it was worth doing it right.

I was honestly impressed with the ease of use in making the video (both in iMovie and Windows Life Movie Maker). Years ago I used Adobe premier to put together something similar, and it was extremely difficult. Granted, that was 12 years ago, and in a very high end program, but at the time, that's what you needed if you wanted to make something well. Now you can do it with free tools. That's saying something.

Using iMovie to go more in depth into the history and culture of a book (in this case Grapes of Wrath) was something I really enjoyed, and is something I could see doing for other works of literature I'll have my students read in class. Video and English go hand in hand. That's the whole reason we have movies in the first place.

I could see having my students do either something similar to what I created, where I represent something of the time period, or perhaps have them record themselves recreating a scene from the book (now easily done from your phone) and putting the pieces together in iMovie or something similar. This could be a very cool tool for making literature not only interesting to read, but something they'll never forget.