This week I decided to video tape myself playing the intro to “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. I spent over a week learning the outrageous intro and training my hands to play notes quickly while still being able to play the notes correctly.
This week, I used and app called iMovie. This app can be found on the App Store on all Apple devices. The app, “iMovie”, allowed me to splice together videos of me playing different parts to make it come together and sound like the actual song. I took 3 different videos, put them together and then faded each video into the other so there wasn’t obvious sound cuts. I also learned how to upload a YouTube video for the first time and it was way easier than I thought. This is a good platform to upload videos when a video is too big to send in an email or a text.
iMovie is a very easy app to use. It can take your videos and pictures and puts them together with transitions that can vary in length depending on preference. I used videos that were taken at separate times and added them in the order of my choosing. Then I went through the video iMovie created me and changed the transitions from being 2 seconds long to only being one second long because I wanted the flow of the video to not be ruined. I hit the “save” button and it saved the progress I made with the edits to my movie. I went back into my movie a few times to make sure all the transitions were the same and that it lined up with the flow of the song. After completing the movie, I exported it to my photos.
From there, I connected my phone to my laptop and uploaded the video onto YouTube. I used the feature that only allows people with the link to watch the video instead of making my video public.
This app can be used in the classroom as an example of how to make a video for a video assignment that you, as an educator, might give your students. This helps ease the stress of getting through a whole video in one take. Students will be able to use multiple videos from multiple takes to put together their own masterpiece.
I think that this app can only truly reach the level of substitution (level 1) on the SAMR model on its own. It might reach the higher levels like augmentation and modification if students start using it to create huge projects with edits, visuals and captions but that is only if a student is willing to use iMovie for that. To reach the top level, redefinition, iMovie would have to be used to truly transform the classroom settings or projects assigned to students. I don’t think that iMovie is capable of that task on its own. It would have to be paired with another app or tool for that.
I have embedded the video into my post so you are able to view it for yourselves!
Next week I will start to learn how to play the different versions of verses in the song!
Great job Kenzie, you’re killing it so far! Thanks for sharing how you used iMovie too, that was very helpful!
Anyone who can play an instrument is absolutely amazing to me!! Good job!
Hey Kenzie, great job with the piano! As someone who also used Imovie I did think it could be used for many different levels of the SARM model but I do see your points too. I look forward to seeing how good you are by the end of the year
Great job playing! It sounded great! I have used iMovie before which would have been in the middle-years grades (I think). We made movie trailers (a built-in feature of the app at the time) as the final project in novel studies, a kitchen safety PSA video, and a shampoo commercial. I remember having a lot of fun creating those videos with my friends and classmates, so I think it is a great app to integrate as an assignment tool if your students are comfortable creating stuff like that.