Assignment 3: YouTube Video

The making of a YouTube video was not a good experience for me. It was my understanding that we could not use screen capture for this so I just used an older video camera and the capture was pretty sad. I was able to make some of the video edits, and text, and audio, but the mixes were not representative of good work.

The transition for my video worked and looked good as did the title, description, tags, and other information included in the assignment. I did enjoy making the video and can see the implications for the classroom. It would be very useful for group projects to let the students make their own YouTube video, however, my students are blocked from YouTube. There is a possibility that they might be able to make it from home, but it is doubtful. The best chance I would have of using this tool would be in my community college online courses. If fact, I am going to have my desktop publishing students do a video tutorial showing how to create a professional desktop publishing document.

My video

There were also issues will trying to embed the code on the mixxt site. I tried it from two different computers, allowed pop-ups, updated java and flash and tried myriad options for uploading, none of which worked. After many hours and attempts, I finally got it to work, but I’m not really sure what I did exactly. I still could not get the Animoto video to embed. It may be the security settings on my home computer and I am just not willing to risk lowering security settings to post videos. I would try it from my work computer, but the district locks us out of the mixxt site so I cannot post. 

Assignment 2: Panoramic and 360 Photographs

One of my favorite activities was the 360 degree movie made with Dermandar. It was definitely a challenge to take the series of photographs needed to make the movie because the camera had to be held very steadily, at the same height each time, and at the same angle in order to work properly. I had to do several takes before it actually worked and then there were still some shadows in the movie. I enjoyed it so much that I made two movies; one was taken outside at the baseball field and one was in the library at Northwest Rankin High School. After make my movie I showed my students how to do it and they loved it. They took their phones outside and made panoramic pictures and the 360 movies. They told me later that they had a lot of fun doing it with their friends.

I later tried several different phone apps to try to create the same type of movie, but did not have much luck. The other apps would either turn off it would try to make the movie before all the pictures had been taken. The apps I tried included EasyPano and DMD Pano. I definitely prefer Dermandar. I am hopeful that better apps like this will be available in the future for Android.

Click to view my panoramic photo.