This week I ended up focusing just on my getting my purl stitch down. I used the website and video from last week to guide me, but honestly, I didn’t need much help this week! I found that the purl stitch was quite easy and I mostly just worked on adding rows of the purl stitch. I am almost done my dark purple section of the purl stitch.

This week I documented my progress using iMovie. I am a big Apple fan so I have iMovie on my MacBook and my iPhone as well. I haven’t gotten a chance to try out iMovie before so here is a quick summary of how I used it this week!!

I found iMovie to be quite easy to make a simple video like I did above. I just clicked on the app from my Launchpad and it opened up to a page where you click the + button to begin a new video. There were two options of videos to make: a movie or a trailer. I decided to do a movie.

To start, I had to open my files app and drag the photos and videos that I wanted to include in my movie. I had to take the photos and videos on my phone first, Airdrop them to my laptop, and then save them under my Files app. Check out this video to see how to start.

Next, I made sure that the photos and videos were in the right order. I could just drag them to where I wanted them to go which was very handy.

After that, I figured out that you can have title slides on top of the videos. All you need to do is click “titles” at the top near the centre and you can drag down the title that you want. These titles end up going over top of your video. You can also drag the length of the title to appear for longer or shorter amounts of time. You can see in my video at the top of this post, that I tried out a few different title options! I didn’t go too into detail with the options in the iMovie this week, but I definitely think that it is user friendly for first timers like me!

Classroom Use

iMovie could definitely be something to incorporate into the classroom for students to make many different types of videos for class projects. I remember being in elementary school and we had to make a movie trailer for a novel that we were studying. I think that iMovie could definitely be an option to do something like that for kids as you can add text, music, and you can bring in a variety of clips all together. Another option for using it in the classroom is to make a presentation video about a topic being studied. This could go a variety of ways depending on the grade and subject area, but I would imagine it as maybe a summative assessment tool for students to demonstrate their learning from a unit or topic.

In terms of the SAMR model, I think that using iMovie would definitely fall under Augmentation, Modification, or Redefinition, and that would depend on how students are using it and for what purpose they are using it for. For a final project, I could see it being more of a modification or redefinition project. It could be an augmentation tool instead of a PowerPoint presentation if students don’t like presenting things live in front of others.

Now, there are obviously so many different ways that iMovie could be used, but in the end, I do think that it is user friendly enough that elementary students could definitely utilize it to demonstrate their learning.

One downfall I can see using iMovie in the classroom is having access to Apple products. I know at my school, we do have iPads that we could potentially use iMovie on, but we have a class set of iPads that are shared between 5 classes, so it could be difficult to find the time where all students in the class could have access to one. Another downfall I can see happening is having the ability to save the videos on the iPads. Because our division is in charge of the iPads, we do not have any say in what can be on the iPads or not, so I anticipate there being an issue with saving the students data on them. Now that I come to think of it, the students would probably never get to use the exact same iPad each time either!

Despite these possible challenges, I am sure that there could be solutions to them all.

All in all, I am happy with my experience with iMovie and I anticipate that I will be able to make more videos using it 🙂