Movie Maker Live, No Voiceover?

Oh Microsoft, you made such significant leaps forward with the new MovieMaker Live, but one glaring problem exists. In the classroom, I’m not always going to be importing full-on video clips. Often, my students just need a great way to add photos to a movie and record their voiceover as a narrative of the visual story.  Or, perhaps I have the video, but I want to easily speak over a clip that has poor audio. You took away the easy voiceover tool in earlier versions of MovieMaker.  So let’s share a work around.

Adding A Voiceover To Movie Maker Live Projects
It’s actually pretty easy, as far as work arounds go. Record your narration in your local audio recorder, export the audio and import it into Movie Maker as a music file.  From that point, you can clip and adjust the length of still photos to match the new audio, or clip and place the audio track so that it matches the video segment that goes with it.

Audacity is my preferred audio recording tool on the pc. It’s a simple and free install. The only trick is that you need to install separately the LAME encoders so that it will export your audio as an mp3.  But even that is pretty easy.

Once installed, open Audacity and hit the little red button to record. Stop when done and go to File – Export as MP3 to get your audio Movie Make-ready.  Movie Maker will import that MP3 after you click the big ‘Add Music’ button at the top of the window.  Drag the new skinny green audio track to wherever you want the audio to be in your movie.

Tips
Movie Maker doesn’t allow multiple audio tracks. There is any audio you have with the video track and the Add Music track.  If you want to have your voice over  with a music background and the occasional frog croaking in the background, you can do all of that audio in Audacity and export it as one single audio track for Movie Maker. Audacity can have many tracks in the project, but exporting will flatten it into one.
Another thing to remember is that when adding audio to Movie Maker, you can edit the audio just like a video clip. Select the audio and then you can split the audio clip in an effort to put space between spoken sentences or such.

Innovate?
So, how do you use movies in your classroom?  One middle school teacher is having the students pull or capture still images that compliment their written stories and record it all as a movie.  Another teacher had students create short movies where students demonstrated what they learned during anti-bully lessons.  An easy scaffolding lesson would be to give small groups the same 3 minute video clip of a class Science demonstration. Have each group compete for the best video using text and voiceovers to show understanding. How would YOU use video in your classroom?

photo: microphone

Paperslide Videos! Easy Student-Made Video Content

Kids like videos. They like watching videos. They like making videos. Videos engage students. Teachers like engaged students. Therefore, teachers should like using videos during instruction.

That's a great concept. In the not-so-distant past, using video in the classroom meant either pushing the play button for a 2 hour sit and stare time or planning out the 2 week computer lab lesson where the teacher had to learn advanced skills and live stressed during the whole project.

This morning, Austin teachers participated in Discovery Education's Virtual Conference and heard Dr. Lodge McCammon of the Friday Institute share the simple Paperslide Video concept in an online webinar. The paperslide video is merely the idea that students create graphic representations on paper that slide across the table below a video camera. No faces on screen, no names given, and the whole process can take less than 25 minutes.

Do you know what 'integers' are?  Watch this student-made video and see if you learn anything.

On Dr. Lodge's website, he discusses  the Why and How to differentiate your instruction in the classroom using these quick one-take videos.  He had over 30 free to use songs on Discovery Streaming in many different curriculum disciplines.  All students have to do is apply the lesson content to their one-page graphics and let their Multiple Intelligences engage them in their learning process.

- Video on "How To Make A Paperslide Video"
- Video and printables describing the successful "No Lecture Classroom"

Teachers using classroom technology, like the standard document camera on the Innovation Station, can easily capture student work in a video and in less than a single class period, they can have students create and publish their work online to be shared with peers and parents! Use the document camera creatively to capture students showing understanding of concepts. It WILL pay off in the classroom.

Quick Classroom-made Videos!

So you are getting used to using a document camera during your instruction.  Are you taking advantage of the video capture capabilities? The AISD Innovation Station's document camera will capture video onto the SD memory card that came with it. Many other brands of document cameras will also capture video.  Try capturing project directions on video and putting it out there for the students to review on the school shared network or your online classroom website.

But can the students also use the video capture?  Sure they can!  We have middle school Language Arts teachers capturing student book report presentations on video. We have student math demonstrations in high school being captured as a group reteach resource. I've been in discussions with elementary teachers about using captured video clips in a student's digital portfolio that travels with him from grade to grade.

Dr. Lodge McCammon, demonstrates how 'paper slide videos' are easily made in the classroom. These are videos with a mounted camera, like the doc cam, and students create their visuals on separate pieces of paper. Sometimes the content is student-created graphics that illustrate an educational song (many cool tunes available on DiscoveryEducation.com that cover high school-level economics through elementary science) or videos like the example here which is a simple voice-over with graphics.




Don't be afraid to try something new or different.  Remember, our digital natives are often looking for reasons to come to school in the first place. With an already-made audio, your doc cam or digital video camera, and warm student body, a teacher can spend half a class period making a video that could stick in their heads the rest of the week. (Believe me. I still have the sublimate song stuck from 3 weeks ago!)

What is a Mashup?

Sounds like 7:30am on Hwy 35, but a Mashup is actually the product of combining two or more web content creations into one digital product.  It can be as simple as using a Wordle picture in your Picnik picture or more complex like having your Blabberize character narrate a YouTube video from within a Google Earth flyover tour.  (Sounds like fun, huh!)

There are many ways to do this, but finding good turorials about mixing web 2.0 media sources can be challenging.  Our friends at Discovery Education presenting "Media Mashups" this summer and have just put up some of their turorials and examples onto the Discovery Education blog.  Hall Davidson posted this with lots of links to their downloadable instructions and online examples. It's really an incredible resource.

This video is from Hall and Steve Dembo, from Discovery Education, and it gives a great example of a high-level mashup as well as good background about Web 2.0.  This comes from a six part video series for educators about Web 2.0. 

--Instructional?--

Our Innovation Stations can not only display the products that the students create, but the document camera can help capture stills and videos that can be used in these products. The Discovery blog linked to above gives tips for making green screen videos. For a large flat green screen, how about making a chromakey-green slide in Powerpoint and projecting it on the screen?

How else could you use your IS to make a Mashup?

Mute Video But Keep Audio?

Teachers are finding great value in the audio mute and AV mute features of the Innovation Station's control pad. Whether as an attention grabbing or refocusing strategy or energy-saving strategy, the mute features are very effective.

However, given that success, some teachers are asking for a way to mute the video but still play the audio over the speakers. That feature was not built into the system, but our microphones give us that ability all on their own.  Each mic has an audio input jack on the side. This is the basic 3.5mm 'headphone' jack which is the same as the audio cable that came with the IS. As an input, that jack will connect any devices audio out or headphone jack to the always on audio system.  Once plugged into the external device's (iPod, jambox, laptop, etc) headphone jack, the device will control the volume level.

Remember, the IS does not need to be on since the Lightspeed sound amp is always on.  Plugging a laptop into the mic means that you will be adjusting the sound level via the laptop's sound control. Remember to return the laptop volume back to about 50% volume when connecting back to the IS and use the IS volume control at that point.

--Instructional?--

What ways do you or would you use this for instruction in your classroom?  Teachers have said they are using it to play soft music during writer's workshop while the screen stays blank. Others commented that they play music during morning routine while the screen can go back and forth between morning agenda and morning announcements.

How would you use it?