Reflection+on+EDLD+5363+Assignment

Video Technology and Multimedia
This assignment was to be a collaborative one. I had to find a group of other students to work with on creating a Public Service Announcement. This was the first class in which I had to work collaboratively with others from across the state. I was very hesitant at first, posting the need to be in a group on the discussion board. I finally got a response from some others and we formed a group. According to Solomon and Schrum (2007) when students collaborate on a project and present what they have learned, they have honed their thinking and organizational skills (p. 21). After forming a group we had to agree upon a subject for our video. The Public Service Announcement was to be 60 seconds or less, include voiceover, text or graphics, and video, and finally exported in a format for the web. During the first week of the project we were to develop the following: Deciding on a subject was not too difficult. We chose cell phone use while driving in a school safety zone as we felt like this subject would be practical for anyone who drives in a school zone but especially for teenagers. One of the most effective forms of nonlinguistic representation is multimedia. . . countless educators have observed that movies and videos help engage students in content (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, p. 103). Writing the shot list was next on the agenda. Our group emailed back and forth working on the order of the PSA. We finally worked out a decent order of shots which included some still graphics also. Writing the script outline and narration required even more emails and even some phone calls. I don’t know why we didn’t create and use a Google doc. Life, in other words our assignment, would have been much easier. Working on a strict time-frame kept us focused. We did not have time to plan, change the plan and then replan. This was going to be a one chance project. While working on the video for our project I learned to let go of being in charge. When anything takes place at school where a group of us work together I always end up being the one in charge. My role for this project was an editor which sounds like the one in charge, but I was not responsible for all of the editing. It was nice to know that I would not have to carry the full load. By the end of the second week we had updated the shot list, updated the narration script, created the still graphics for the video, exchanged video shots and were ready to combine everything. When the video footage was being placed in the editing program our editor realized that we were missing the footage of the flashing lights on the school safety zone sign. Several of us took footage hoping for a good close-up. We all sent the footage to him so he could decide which to use. The last week arrives along with some frantic emails concerning the movie. Is it one minute or less, does our voiceover match the video? Are we ready to post to YouTube? Are we really finished? One last email with the link for the video and we are done. We were to either embed or put a link to the video on out blog or wiki. One of the key features of YouTube is the ability of users to view its videos on web pages outside the site. This functionality is often used to embed YouTube videos in [|__social networking__] pages and [|__blogs__] (“Content Accessibility”, 2011). Creating a video was not new to me, I have been teaching video editing since Adobe Premiere 5.0 came out. I have made videos, created rubrics for grading videos and graded videos. The difference between what I have done in the past and doing the video for this project was the short amount of time involved and working online as a collaborative team. When working on this assignment there were a couple of times when I wrote what needed to be written and emailed it to everyone for approval or changes and got only one response in what I considered a timely manner, so the two of us made a couple of the decisions without the others. The other two did not indicate that they were disturbed by this so our decisions stayed. I still do not know why we did not use one of the wikis we had already created or a Google doc to collaborate on this project. When I think about it I am just clueless. Using a wiki would have made the collaboration faster, and there might have been more timely participation by all involved. One thing I will be able to do after participating in this class is to initiate a collaborative project and not be shy when working with the others. One thing I plan to do in the future is to assist other teachers with plans for student created videos that address the TEKS for those classes.
 * Project proposal
 * Script outline and narration script
 * Shot list
 * Copyright information

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E.R., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). //Using technology with classroom instruction that works.// Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2007). w//eb 2.0 new tools, new schools.// Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

“YouTube”. (2011). Retrieved on October 27, 2011 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube