1.) Technology takes time. I mean, wow. I am sure not everyone left the assignment until the weekend, but for those who did, I am sure it consumed some major time. I was in a multimodal induced coma of sorts, with "This I Believe" segments ringing in my head. My husband watched the show and said something like, "This is what has taken you all weekend? Just to make four minutes?" Note to self: start earlier next time, and work when husband is at work.
2.) There is a steep techie learning curve. I spent 60% of my time figuring out how to do something and 40% of my time actually doing it. The good news this that things go much faster once you understand what you are doing.
3.) A cool idea is not always a feasible one. I found all these great videos to put in my presentation, figured out how to upload them, finally placed them in my slide show, and then crash. Crash. Crash again. "Do I want to notify Microsoft of the problem?" No. No. No. I must have tried 50 times. Sometimes cutting bait and forming plan B is best in order to focus on the feasible. We aren't Steven Spielbergs. (Although if anyone else had crash problems with Windows Movie Maker and overcame them, let me know, I still want to learn how to do it.)
4.) The research can be more valuable as the end product. I was thinking we could use the blog to share some of the tools most helpful to us in creating these assignments. Might help with point #2 above. Share if you want!
For example:
Uploading device: Firefox's videodownload helper. And convert helper.
Presentation program used: ProShow, http://www.photodex.com/ I could not get Windows Movie Maker to do anything I wanted it to do without crashing.
Audio editing software used: Audacity, http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ (Alex told me about this.)
Audio Material used: Public Radio Exchange, http://www.prx.org/. Really cool site, with thousands of public radio clips. Free to use with a basic account.
Pictures: Google Images. Love it.
I think that is about it for mine. For those of you who used videos, I am curious where you got them. Youtube?
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I think this project killed my computer...or at least sucked out most of what little life remained. But my frown turned upside down when I noticed that Apple came out with a newer and cheaper MacBook. Things work quite strangely in my life.
I finally figured out how to convert an iTunes-copyrighted m4p music file to an aiff file for use in Powerpoint.
It's so ridiculously simple, and I'm still kicking myself for not doing this first:
Burn the song to a cd. Go to itunes preferences : advanced : importing options : this is where you change the type of file that the song will be imported.
Import the song from the cd. Now it's on your harddrive (in the iTunes folder) as an aiff or whatever you chose and will work in Powerpoint.
Another tip:
I originally created my video in iMovie, but because the images were so small (small resolution and file size) they looked terrible in iMovie. Once I opened them in Powerpoint, the quality was much better. I'm also glad I used Powerpoint because it allows one of my slides to link to the Internet, thus making the movie interactive.
Long story short:
little image files: Powerpoint
large image files: iMovie
m4p to aiff, mp3, etc: easy as pie.
spending 8+ hours using iTunes, PowerPoint, and iMovie: kills a 5 year old Powerbook and leaves the user with a migrane.
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