Jul 10 2009
Small Wonder??
I have spent the day at an excellent workshop that was offered by my school board (Ottawa Carleton District) on the Small Wonder camera. I have used one before but I like going to workshops to see what I haven’t discovered myself or to learn what other people are planning to do with their classes and the technology. It is also a great opportunity to reconnect with people who I haven’t seen for a while.
We spent the morning playing around with the cameras. The cameras are fairly inexpensive, about $100.00. They are really easy to use. Big red button means record. Delete means delete. On and off, well they let you turn it on or off. Kids would have no problem using them. I can think of many different uses for my class next year. There is one downside though…. Movie maker!
The Small Wonder cameras are plug and play making it easy to import video, and still pictures, into the computer. Once on your computer the material can be edited and combined to make a “movie” that can be shared or uploaded. Movie maker is what we are using to do the editing and so far today Movie Maker HATES ME. I have copied my video onto the computer. I have created a folder to store it all in and I save every two seconds because Movie Maker keeps crashing. I don’t know if I want to put my students through this.
The advantages of Movie Maker are that it is free and that it is already on my school computers but I think these might be outweighed by the crashing issue. Does anyone have a solution for me? Please don’t point me to iMovie. All the computers in our schools are pc. I would love to hear how others deal with the crashing problem.
And for your entertainment, I was going to add my little video created this morning with the Small Wonder and Movie Maker. However, I saved all my video files, I saved my Movie Maker project but…I did not do the final step of finishing the video in Movie Maker to make it a final copy. I thought that I could take it all home, do some finishing touches to the project and then publish something truly great and Oscar worthy. Now on my home computer I can see all my video clips in my storyboard but when I play my video I just get the sound and a black screen. AAARGH! This is all good learning, I guess. It would be really frustrating to encounter these problems taking student work back and forth from home and school.
The long cool summer drinks are helping. Thanks for the red wine suggestion Roger.
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Hi Jane,
Movie Maker likes lots of RAM and a fast processor to work with video. Stills, no problem, but video — not so much. We have only had real success in our district with editing video on our PCs that have at least 1GIG of RAM. The 512 RAM machines just don’t do very well.
With regards to your “take it home” situation. The only solution we have found is laptops as Movie Maker imports in a proprietary format which does not transfer to another machine at home.
You may wish to investigate Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 which has just been Min. approved. This software requires a lot of RAM too.
Anyway, keep on using video with students as the research supports its use, especially with boys.
Take care,
Kent
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@Kent, Thanks for the speedy reply. I am really pleased to hear that Adobe Premiere has been approved.
I will keep fighting the good fight. I like video too!
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Hi Jane,
Two thoughts (French wine has my mind mellow):
-if your computer permits, the RCA software imports and manages video files in a way MMaker seems to like best;
-don’t have MM in front of me, but you do indeed have to save or export the project to a desired format in order to move it elsewhere.
On a last inspirational note, see The Gift on my class blog. My students made me a goodbye movie. Touching.
Roger
lemelintrailertalk@blogspot.com
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Hey Jane,
Movie Maker on Vista is EONS ahead of previoud versions. When the board goes to vista…in 6 or 7 years…you`ll have a much better time.
Roger
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