PE6_MovieMaker Audio and Narration

Another blog on MovieMaker. Well, this time I am going to be discussing adding sound so your video. MovieMaker gives you several options to adding audio to your projects. These include narration, background music, and sound effects. With narration, within MovieMaker, you just select narration and record your own voice using your line in function or your microphone. MovieMaker allows you also adjust the volume levels of your narration. With MovieMaker, you can also add background music or audio. This music can be adjusted with your narration to create a full quality video effect. You can also add sound effects and import your own to be used with your clips. Using MovieMaker is a great way to capture the attention of your audience as they anticipate what they will see or hear next, especially knowing that you are the one who created the video. MovieMaker can be saved in various formats to be uploaded to your video camera for playback on your big screen. Or you can save the project as an avi or mov file to be imported into another video format. So there you have it Windows MovieMaker.

PE5_Movie Maker - Creating Titles and Overlays

Add Titles and Overlays

With MovieMaker, you have the ability to add titles and overlays to your video. You can choose whether to add your titles to the beginning of the video as an introduction, before clips, simultaneously to appear with your clips; you can add animation to the titles, and you can add credits at the end of your video. With MovieMaker, I have not found too many things that I cannot do with regard to Pinnacle Studio that we currently use at my school. Before beginning this journey, I was somewhat intimidated with MovieMaker but now I am excited and giving that same excitement to my students. I enjoy changing the fonts and adding transitions to the my titles and captions. My students are beginning to really get the hang of if and spend countless hours now working to create masterpiece videos for school projects as well as for their families at home.

PE4_Movie Maker

Welome to MovieMaker

This week's tool I choose to use is Windows Movie Maker. As a teacher of video, I wanted to make sure that I am really teaching my students as many possibilities with video as possible. Currently, we create and edit our videos using Pinnacle Studio, which is a great video editing tool. But my students do not have access the tool from home. So since Movie Maker and is free and for the most part is already loaded on the computer, I thought this would be a great tool.

Often times when a product is free is it not as robust and somewhat limits your capabilities, but not MovieMaker. This tool is very robust and even the free version can meet all your video needs. MovieMaker allows you to import from your digital or video cameras, vcr, hard drive or cd. Once you have your pictures and or video clips uploaded to your hard drive, all you do is import into your MovieMaker project and now the editing can begin. You have options to to add video effects, titles, transitions, and background music to your projects. MovieMaker allows you to edit your individual clips by breaking them up into smaller clips and trimming your clips to add more precision to your video. Since we have access to flip cameras at school, my kids can use those to capture video at our sporting events instead of using our video recorders. With movie maker, they can come into class, upload the video footage and begin the editing process. This creates a dynamic of collecting video from multiple sources to save for our daily announcements for the school to view. Not to mention that they can work on video from home. Students can even add introduction slides to their video making their clips a more complete and finished product, making my job a lot easier. Once they have their video edited they can save the finished product to a movie file of which can be imported into pinnacle. So there you have it, Windows MovieMaker. A great video editing tool suitable for all you video needs.

BP11_Comment to Leon

 Follow this link to view my comment on Leon's Blog.

BP10_Blog Comment

Follow this link to my comments in Ishia's blog.

BP9_Zohodocs

This weeks web 2.0 that I selected is Zoho.com. Zoho is a collaboration site that will manage all of your personal and business needs. Zoho products include, docs very similar to google docs. It has also has email, chat capabilities,  a calendar and a planner. The chat will allow you to set a page background theme, and the docs will allow you to set up a watermark. So the tools within Zoho are fun to work with.
Zoho collaboration includes in your own wiki, blog, personal and public forum.
Zoho business will allow you to virtually manage all your business needs from, meetings, recruiting, managing staff, invoices, keeping time and much much more. All of the tools can be shared with options for others to view, or edit documents. It is a great collaboration tool.

This is a really robust tool offering you many options on a personal and business needs.

The reason I picked this tool is because not only can you work from the Zoho website. At my school we have implemented a social networking tool for our students and Zoho docs is imbedded right into the tool. With Zoho docs, me and my students can create and share documents with one another. I like the fact that I can create a document, share it with my students. They can create their response to my document and save it to their digital locker for me to view and grade later. So Zoho is a tool within a tool. My students really like the fact that they can create a paper, have me view it before printing out a final copy. Also, this year, my district is really cutting back on our ability to print. Using Zoho documents for my students work gives them the opportunity to create it and save it or they can email me the zoho doc for grading. Really cuts down on printing. Also, students can share documents with one another and this is a great feature when they are creating working on projects.

BP12_Zohodocs

 PB9_Zoho Docs