Desktop Video Reflection

This assignment called for me to make an educational video and upload it to Teacher Tube www.teachertube.com. I chose to explain how the Electoral College works and the intricacies of the system.

I have never used Windows Movie Maker before so I was a bit nervous. The software, however, is extremely user friendly. It was easy to add sound files, graphics, and special effects to the film. I did struggle with getting the audio from the camcorder on to the computer, but the problem was solved after two trips to Radio Shack.

When I filmed the video I explained several visual aides that I planned to place on the screen. While editing the film I could not figure out how to place a graphic on the storyboard and keep the audio from the recording going. To solve this problem I used the narrate time line option. I attached a microphone to the computer and explained the visual aides.

I made the different clips of the movie fade in and out to allow the movie to flow naturally. Also I added text on to the screen where appropriate. This assignment was my favorite of all the projects in the class. It was a nice introduction to creating, editing, and uploading a video.

Specific things I learned:
o How to transfer video from a camcorder to a computer.
o How to use the program Windows Movie Maker to edit video footage.
o How to narrate the timeline using a microphone.
o How to upload videos to Teacher Tube.
o How to insert both visual aides and sound files into a video.

PowerPoint Reflection

This assignment called for me to make a non-linear PowerPoint presentation that could be used as an educational tool. Immediately I thought about making a game that reviewed course content. I searched on the class website and the internet and found tutorials on how to make popular games such as Jeopardy, Hollywood Squares, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire with PowerPoint. I used the knowledge I gained from the tutorials to construct my own game, Race for The Presidency.

In Race for the Presidency the classroom splits into two teams and alternates answering questions. Each team picks a certain state and travels to that state to “campaign.” If the team impresses the constituents by answering the question correctly, that team gets all of that state’s electoral votes. An incorrect answer gives the electoral votes to the opposing team. The game has three different types of questions: true of false, multiple choice, and fill in the blank(s). The difficulty of each question correlates with the amount of electoral votes each state has – the more electoral votes, the more difficult the question. The first team to accumulate 270 electoral votes wins!

I wanted to make sure the game was visually appealing so I browsed through the preloaded PowerPoint themes, but did not find any I liked. So I jumped on the internet to search for themes. I found a set of themes that had states as background for the slides. This was perfect, so I downloaded fifty files and unzipped them to a folder on the desktop. To find out where these files needed to go, I went to save a file as a theme in PowerPoint. Unfortunately, I could not easily navigate to this folder because some of the folders were hidden. I searched online and discovered how to get my computer to show hidden files. I went slide by slide and inserted a theme for each state.

I created a game board slide that had the names of every state and appropriately liked to each state. I made the links “disappear” by having a visited link change to the same color as the background. I started putting questions on each slide and realized that using the copy and paste function would allow for uniformity and save a lot of time. I made a basic template for each type of question and simply copied and pasted the templates throughout the project. Next I connected the links and the basic setup was complete. I added the questions and answers, through in some bells and whistles and the project was complete. Overall the project was a great learning experience and turned out well. I would be able to use it in the classroom.

Specific things I learned:

• How to work with Zip files.
• How to allow the computer to show hidden files.
• How to insert themes from the internet into PowerPoint.
• How to use the copy and paste feature for informality of slides and to save time.
• How to download sound files from the internet and insert them into PowerPoint.
• How to create a non-linear PowerPoint presentation.
• How to make a link “disappear.”

Newsletter

The first assignment I completed for the class was a newsletter. The project required me to create a newsletter for use by students or parents. I chose to make an abridged syllabus to introduce my students to the class. The main sections of the document were course description, course objectives, grades, rules and hints, my contact information, and some of the interesting topics the class will cover.

I typed up all my thoughts and was left with a giant mess. To organize the clutter, I used a pen and paper to draw how my ideal newsletter would look. I put the title on top, contact information on the bottom and sectioned off the paper into five other subdivisions. I was now ready to turn my information into an attractive newsletter.

Since the course was American Government, I thought it would be appropriate to use a red, white, and blue theme. Of course I didn’t want to stick to just three basic colors so I used shading all over the entire document. I’m colorblind so I periodically had my roommates make sure everything was staying red, white, and blue. I could have very easily made a red, white, and green document which may have lead the viewer to think the government syllabus was referring to Belarus, not America.

I already had a thin blue line with stars in it on my computer and wanted to use that as the border for my document. Wow, this was a task! I did not know it was so difficult to use a custom image to create a border. Of course it was only difficult to me because I had to figure out how to do it; everything is easier the second time around.

I then filled in the blank spaces with my content. I used WordArt to put an attractive “American Government” title on the page. I put a star that had a flag design on both sides of the title. To acquire this image I used Google’s image search (images.google.com). Below that I typed the course description in blue but highlighting the fundamental issue (What, if anything, should government do) in red. I inserted four text boxes for the remaining content areas. Two of these text boxes had shaded colored backgrounds, one blue and one red.

Since I already had my breakdown of grades in percentage form, I thought it would be nice to insert a pie chart for the grades section. I made a simple spreadsheet on Excel and figured out how to make a pie chart. It was amazing simple. I used five shades of red, white and blue to differentiate the five pieces of the pie. I simply copied the graph and pasted it into Word.

Finally I inserted a table into the document to house my contact information. I’ve always been nervous of using tables, but it was surprisingly simple. I straightforwardly grabbed the table pen and drew a table. I shaded the different cells and inserted my text; simple enough! I was nervous to try to do something like this on Word but it turned out to be a great learning experience.

Specific things I learned from this assignment:
o It is much easier to draw an outline on paper then trying to imagine the entire document in my head.
o How to use an image from a file for the boarder of a document.
o How to make WordArt.
o How wrapping style works for pictures.
o How to insert and use text boxes in Word.
o How to make a graph in Excel and place it into Word.
o How to use color shading.
o How to make a table.
o Concepts of visual literacy.
o How to make an attractive newsletter using Word.


Here’s what my document looks like:
(It's a little grainy because it was shrunk a little bit)