…and I'm all out of bubble gum.
Posts tagged screencast
A Breezy Introduction to Basic Animation in Flash
Feb 26th
The tough thing about best practices is remembering to practice them: a while back I started to collect my screencasts on particular topics into one, easy-to-remember link (e.g. iMovie ’09 information is at http://battis.net/link/imovie09). I spent a while uploading my Flash tutorials to one of my class conferences the other day, forgetting to just create the simple link (and thereby limit repetitive work). So, with that in mind…
Here are a few tutorials on animation (at a basic level) in Flash 8 Professional. They need to be re-recorded and cleaned up a little, but they’re a useful starting place for someone totally at a loss when faced with Flash’s ridiculous learning curve. The link to this post and to anything else I might have to say about Flash is http://battis.net/link/flash8
The videos in this sequence are (with links to higher-quality, but less-firewall-friendly, Screencast-O-Matic videos):
- Create a Simple Animation — How to create a simple Flash Professional 8 animation using a Motion Tween between two keyframes.
- Adding Complexity to a Motion Tween — How to use rotation (or scale, skew or other Transformations) to adjust a simple animation.
- Adding a Motion Guide — How to add a Motion Guide layer to a simple animation in Flash Professional 8.
- Shape Tweens — How to use Shape Tweens to animate motion (or, well, shapes) in Flash Professional 8.
- Reverse Exploding Animation — How to have a scattered group of shapes “resolve” themselves into your design in Flash Professional 8 (this was a request from my media design class).
iTeach: Reenforcing Hands-On Learning with Video
Feb 12th
One of my responsibilities at Jewish Day School is to write a weekly “tech tips” column for the online faculty news. This is one such tip.
One major challenge that students (of any age) face when learning how to use a new tool is that, when demonstrated, the application seems simple and easy. But now, on one’s own, finding that button or toggle that made everything easy in class is deucedly difficult. There are a number of ways to combat this, ranging from having the teacher physically present every moment that students are completing their first (and maybe second and third) projects to shrugging our collective shoulders and averring that, in fact, the puzzling-it-all-out process builds character and reenforces learning. Pain doesn’t reenforce learning; pain reenforces aversion to learning. Instead, how about providing instructions? Perhaps even instructions in the manner in which they were presented in the classroom, creating a familiar context and voice? A number of teachers have been exploring the possibilities of screencasting — recording what’s happening on your computer — in teaching with technology this year. It’s easy: it only takes a few minutes to record a screencast and post it to the internet, where you have a link to share with students at the end of a lesson.
An example of a quick use of screencasts to reenforce in-class teaching: A quick introduction to iMovie ’09
All these tools have links to screencasts explaining how to use them on their front pages! (How meta is that?)
- Screencast-O-Matic is free and requires no setup
- Screenjelly is free and requires no setup
- Jing isn’t entirely free, but is wicked powerful
Further resources: [A colleague] and Seth Battis talk about their experiences screencasting this year on the Laptop Leader pages.
A Beginner’s Guide to Video Editing in iMovie ’09
Feb 6th
In preparation for a class that I’ll be visiting on Monday morning, and because I have found myself explaining these things a bunch of times this year, I have put together a quick series of screencasts that give an introduction to basic video editing in iMovie. I do this not because I think that my students can learn to work in iMovie by following me stuttering and mumbling through a screencast, but because having a visual guide to refer back to after class is helpful.
A quick link to this (and anything else I may have to say about iMovie ’09) is: http://battis.net/link/imovie09
You may also be interested in more specific tutorials, and Apple has a bunch posted online. (And you can search for more on YouTube).
The basic sequence of these videos is (and here I’ll link directly to the original Screencast-O-Matic videos, which are slightly higher quality than the YouTube playlist above):
- 5 Minute Introduction to iMovie ’09 – This is a lightning fast orientation to very basic video editing in iMovie ’09.
- Using Still Images in iMovie ’09 – Importing and editing still images instead of video clips in iMovie ’09.
- Adding a Video Transition in iMovie ’09 – How to add transitions between video clips to make our project look more professional.
- Adding Titles to a Video in iMovie ’09 – How to add explanatory text (a.k.a. titles) to a video in iMovie ’09.
- Adding Audio Track(s) to a Video in iMovie ’09 – How to add music, effect and voiceover soundtracks to a video in iMovie ’09.
- Sharing Your iMovie ’09 Masterpiece with Other People – A brief rant about how to export your iMovie ’09 project as a video file that other people can watch.
