Windows Movie Maker - Group Leadership Project

WMM Professional Development

1) What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial?  Why?

For our group project we chose to examine the benefits of using a program like Windows Movie Maker in the classroom. With this professional development piece we examined how WMM addresses various teaching strategies and standards, and how it might be implemented in each of the core content areas. 

To package this tutorial we used Camtasia. Honestly I had never heard of this technology before but it was offered up by a group member as a good tool to use and so we decided to use it. This program was a little difficult for me to use, especially since it kept crashing my computer for some reason. Personally now that I have used Camtasia, I feel like I would be much more comfortable using something like Jing in the future. 

2) What did you learn during the development process of the final product?

As I went through this process I was able to get more familiar with Google Drive (we used Google Docs and Google Presenter for Part A & B). I did learn some of the basic functions of Camtasia but as I mentioned earlier it did not get along very well with my computer so it was difficult to get too in depth with the program. 

3) What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?

In the future I am not sure that I would use a program like Camtasia unless a group member is very familiar with it and can explain some of the ins and outs. In general I would prefer not to use a completely novel program to put the finishing touches on such a large project. It appeared that everyone in the group was having difficulty with Camtasia and it created some problems with the group members. 

I also plan on double checking that group members actually have access to the program that is the basis of our  project. Towards the end of putting our tutorial together I was emailed by my group stating that they could not do the introduction to our tutorial because they did not have or did not know how to work Windows Movie Maker. This of course put added pressure on me after I had completed a significant amount of the overall project already. I created the introduction hesitantly only to find out that another group member went ahead and submitted just before I sent my version out. At the time I was frustrated but it is over now and it appears that the final product is done well. I did notice that my spoken portion seemed to lose some volume after it was converted and sent off to the other members to be compiled with their parts, but we just ran out of time to really work out some of the flaws.