Week Six: Operation Multimedia

It is difficult to believe that I am doing a retrospective of the sixth week of our term already. Needless to say, that is more than a little intimidating to consider, as we begin the inevitable mad sprint to the finish of the term and the beginning of student teaching.

Our Week In Review: 
We spent much of this week discussing multimedia and worked to create a slide show featuring digital photographs, set to music. For my own show, I chose to do something related to my teaching plans for the term, a slideshow on Ethiopia, using pictures from the Wikimedia Commons. My desire would be to impress upon students that there is more to Ethiopia than what they usually hear about it, that is, of a country full of starving children. I chose images of the landscape, of the wildlife, of their culture and history to give a brief impression that of the rich heritage of one of the world's oldest nations.

Using Animoto to produce this was simplicity itself, with the selection and arrangement of the pictures being significantly more difficult than the other visual and auditory elements of it. While the video that was produced was ultimately serviceable, I was a little disappointed at the low quality of the images that were produced. I suppose that the paid service would give you options to have better sound quality, as well as longer videos. I think that a minute-long show with a greater number of images and higher quality would go a long way towards fulfilling the purpose I desire. Perhaps I should try Photostory to see how that compares.

In addition to making a slideshow, we also used photomanipulation programs in order to turn an ordinary image into something considerably more amusing. I used BeFunky to add an appropriate frame to a Shakespearan image as well as suitably knavish dialogue. I must say, it looked better on my screen than it did up at the front of class. In the future, I would have used speech balloons so as to make the text more visible than it was. This is something which I need to do some more experimenting with before I can feel confidant in my mastery.

Looking Forward: 
Next week, we're making a movie, which should be exciting. Our plan is to do it as a large group and then split into two groups in order to edit the film differently, which should make it interesting to compare the two edits together. I've never really participated in a project like this before, so it should be interesting to see how it all turns out ...