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/>