Group Leadership Project- CEP 812

Hello! This is our final PD product for CEP 812. It is a great tutorial in how to use Windows Movie Maker across content areas to create engaging lessons. These lessons are all aligned with various standards. The video for our final product can be found here.

Below, you will find a description of our final product as well as some takeaways from the process itself. You may also want to read other posts about our production process here and here.

Tool Used:

For this tutorial, we recorded our use of Windows Movie Maker with Camtasia Studio. Windows Movie Maker is a tool that all people with a Windows PC can access. Because of this, we decided to use it as a tool to deliver content. Students are able to use it in a variety of ways to help foster deep student understanding of a topic. Many standards within the Common Core can be easily showcased. Each discipline that is highlighted uses it in a slightly different way. We used Camtasia Studio to record our “teaching” because it is easy to use and because it provides a seamless recording environment. In addition, it has a 30 day free trial that each of us could use.

Lessons Learned:

I learned a couple of things while working on this assignment. First of all, it was apparent that we each have a variety of interpretations when it comes to the requirements of one assignment. Each member within our group internalized the instructions differently. At times, this made it difficult for us to create a clear and consistent product. Additionally, I learned that there can and always will be problems when putting together a large assignment like this. When using video, people will use different codecs to encode their video and programs like Windows Movie Maker will crash on a variety of computers. Previews won’t show up and audio will fail to record. It is important to experiment far in advance with the technology to make sure that it works properly. In fact, we had so many problems that the final video was actually compiled within Camtasia Studio instead of Windows Movie Maker. While the videos that students would produce would be simplistic enough for WMM to handle, more advanced compilations would require a tool like Camtasia.

Things to do Different in the Future:

If I developed a similar product again, I would practice using the recording software far in advance. Most of the problems that occurred were do to the learning curve of Camtasia. I would also make sure that our group goals were more clearly outlined from the beginning. At times I was confused as to what my individual task was. Because of this I was concerned that the final product would not adequately show how helpful a tool like WMM could be in the classroom.