My Video Experience (arrrgghhhh)
Well, I finally finished the video for my Moodle course. It has been quite the adventure. I have filmed, edited, and rendered numerous times and experienced several different levels of frustration that I didn’t know existed. To make a long story short, I don’t own a good video camera (unless you count my little Kodak EasyShare). What I decided to do was a Camtasia video of one of my lessons I do in my Social Studies 11 course. It’s about the Demographic Transition Model. What is that you ask? Well, I will show you. After I’m done explaining how I came to my final product. You’ll just have to wait. I need to vent.
My first attempt turned out fine but there were some problems. It was too big to upload directly into Moodle. Then I uploaded it into Youtube and embedded it into my Moodle course. All good, right? Not so fast. Part of my video was a screencast of a flash animation that I use in my class with me explaining how it works. It is from a third party source and is free for educational use. I thought, this should be okay. Then I went back and looked at the terms of use. It seemed okay at first blush. It said I could use it for educational purposes. I figured this fits in. Then it said that it couldn’t be hosted on another server and here I am, I have the thing uploaded on Youtube. Not exactly a closed shop! I completed this yesterday. I had a sleepless night worrying if perhaps I had infringed on copyright and thinking that this would be a pretty stupid way to finish my last two weeks in the whole MET program (oh, that’s right, 590 is beckoning at the same time).
So, after dropping my son off at art camp this morning (cartooning, soapstone carving, and airbrushing – interesting combination but he’s having fun), I came home, deleted the whole video from Youtube and my Moodle site and then spent several hours creating a Demographic Transition Model in Microsoft Excel. That only took a few hours! Then I had to re-film myself explaining how it worked, re-edit it, re-render it, re-upload it, and re-insert it in my Moodle course (I think I may have just set a record for the number of times the prefix re- has been used in succession)! Long story short, I feel much better about this video than I did about the other one (which is now in my recycling bin {there’s that prefix again!}).
In the end, for my first attempt at creating and uploading a video (okay, I guess it was my third or fourth but I’m counting successful, copyright free creations) I was pretty happy with the final product. I’m including it here for your perusal.
Cheers,
Ken