iMovie

Our task for this week was to make a little movie out of stills. For us Mac-users the program to use was iMovie. My prior exposure to iMovie was extremely limited, but I really got into the task. It turns out there's a lot involved in getting one of these photo-montages to look good; transitions, filters, Ken Burns effects, etc. I was pretty happy with what I ended up with.(Check it out above)

I think that using this program would be very useful in teaching humanities. Using iMovie, in conjunction with an audio editing program like Audacity, students could put together Ken Burns style presentations for their humanities classes that included maps, still photographs collected from the web,and spoken commentaries (provided by the students). I think this would be great assessment task for those students who were too shy to talk in front of the entire class, as it would involve the same kind of learning as a more traditional classroom presentation, but could be put together in the privacy of the student's bedroom.

It seems I'm not the first to have had this idea. The following article talks about the use of this kind of a learning activity by SOSE teachers in the U.S. 

Ferster, Hammond and Bull, (2006) "Primary Access: creating digital documentaries in the social studies classroom",(in) CBS Interactive Business Library, URL=<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6541/is_3_70/ai_n29261950/>

PowerPoint

I have used PowerPoint for a number of years for lectures and seminar presentations at university, so most of the stuff in the Atomic Learning tutorial (http://www.atomiclearning.com/)was pretty familiar.

In the past, I have been in the habit of using the custom animation functions, but only as a means of revealing one dot-point at a time as I move through the material contained in a slide. (I find that if the entire content of a slide come up at once, the audience tends to try and read the whole slide before they tune into what the presenter is saying).

I haven’t gotten into anything too fancy with my PP’s, as I’ve seen them more as tool to keep myself and the audience on track and focused when I’m lecturing or presenting, and have viewed the fancier entries and transitions as a bit of a distraction from the content of the actual lecture/presentation.

Of course, Prezi presentations (http://prezi.com/) tend to be even more visually stimulating than the fanciest PowerPoint you're likely to see, and people seem to love those at the moment. Mind you, I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason people love Prezi so much is precisely because it gives them a welcome distraction from uninspiring speakers.

All that aside, I did learn a few things from the Atomic Learning tutorial that I think I will apply in the future; for example the stuff on putting diagrams together (great for catering for the more visually inclined learner), and the stuff on creating custom master slides.

I found in last semester's placement that PP was a great tool in history classes for showing the students primary sources, maps, etc. Some of the presentations I used last semester did not contain any text at all, which was good. (There's no danger you'll just read from the slides if the slides don't contain any text!)

Here's a quick movie to show you a PowerPoint I used in one of my year 8 Medieval European History  lessons last semester. The topic was crime and punishment; specifically, torture devices. I put the pictures of the torture devices up before showing the text, and had the girls talk about how the devices might have been used. They were surprisingly good at working them out!