Slate-boards to Notebooks (Rote to Note)
Introduction
Walk through time as I explore the significant technological developments leading from the use of individual slate-boards to the use of spiral notebooks. Also discussed are the educational, cultural, and literacy implications these technologies had on society.
Style
When I watch a video documentary, I appreciate visuals that complement, not overpower, the audio. The visuals need to be informative and simple so that I can focus on the audio content. For this reason, I chose to create the Prezi in black and white, and limited the visual reading so that it complemented the audio.
Production Choice
I wanted to use Prezi as the visual component of the video documentary because of its simple and clean presentation style, but wasn’t sure how to incorporate voice-over. After doing some research, I discovered that audio files could be inserted into the Prezi animations, but still could not figure out how to download the Prezi as a movie file as opposed to being in a live-presentation format.
I found raving reviews about a piece of Mac software called “ScreenFlow” and was able to download a trial version for 2 weeks to explore it more. ScreenFlow allows Mac users to capture video of their laptop screen while simultaneously recording audio. This enabled me to present the visuals using Prezi, and add my own interjections with the built-in microphone on my laptop. The only downside to the trial version was that the exported video produced a “demo” watermark on the finished product. However, I decided that this software was too incredible to do without and decided to make an investment. I can see many uses for this in the future!
Successes
I’m quite proud of my editing capabilities! Instead of re-recording sections, I was able to use the software to edit out pronunciation blips in the audio, and edit the visuals accordingly so everything still matched up.
Challenges
My biggest challenge was the technology-troubleshooting of the ScreenFlow software. That being said, the software is extremely easy to navigate and is very similar to GarageBand (Mac) – which I have lots of experience with!
As always, I had trouble with recording the audio (I suppose I am microphone shy?). It took many takes and some savvy editing, but it all came together.
The Script (PDF)
Slate-boards to Notebooks – From Rote to Note [Script]
The Video