I Should Be Marking

My Y10 iMedia class are working on the Video Editing unit (Unit 6). We have a couple of very short scripts provided by our head of Drama/Theatre Studies which are very good for introducing media language and such, but I’m not able to add to that repository myself. Having the students write their own script at this point is not what I’m after (although it will be) and so I set off to find some ready made examples.

Just a few short hours (!) later I came across SimplyScripts, a home for unproduced scripts, film scripts, TV scripts and more. I found literally hundreds of short scripts just ripe for the using. Of course I had to filter through a lot of inappropriate files (I know how it feels to deal with a publisher’s slush pile for a few hours) due to length, setting, tone, content, etc. but came up with 5 really good scripts to use (and I’m only up to the end of the Ds!).

A bloody useful resource I reckon.

Whilst reading John @ Sandaig Primary I came across this site with a league table of educational tools. Needless to say I don’t agree with or require the use of every tool and I certainly wouldn’t put them in that exact order myself – but there are plenty of ideas on there.

One in particular is Zoho which I’ve been playing with today. As well as a basic office suite there are all manner of other uses and existing Yahoo and Google users can sign in instantly with the new OpenID.

There are a lot of ways to help students learn – chalk and talk, printed worksheets, online instructions, video tutorials…

And of course there are many bits of software to help create video tutorials. On a PC I really like Wink (freeware) and Adobe’s Captivate and Techsmith’s Camtasia (most definitely not free).

I’ve struggled for a long time to find a decent Mac alternative and discovered in this week in Flip 4 Mac’s Screenflow. At $99 it’s not free, but it is very reasonable in comparison to Captivate and Camtasia. What’s particularly good is you can record any combination of screen, iSight camera, microphone and system sound and then very simply add highlighting, zooming, blurring and opacity effects.

Within 70 seconds I had created a simple Flash tutorial, and 2 minutes later I had tweaked it and exported it (the content isn’t brilliant as no planning went into it – but you can watch it here if you’re interested*).

So all-in-all I’m impressed! All I need now is a plan and a few hours (and possibly a bit of Dutch courage) and I’ll be off.

* Yes, I know I need a haircut.

I have a dilemma. When we first installed the Macs in my IT suite (PCs and Terminal Servers everywhere else) we had to make do with a local profile. This meant that all work was saved directly on the computer – although it could be copied to the server it had to be done manually and was a pain (and it was always my fault if pupils lost work, naturally).

After a lot of work we managed to set up roaming profiles – so work was automatically (transparently) saved into students’ home directories on the network. We even managed to set up local shortcuts for DV files and video editing. Huzzah!

The problem now is that applications such as Flash, Dreamweaver (and everything else made by Adobe), Google Earth and even MS Office applications use temporary and cache files on the server rather than locally. This means that applications run slowly and running Flash with a full class is simply not viable.

So do I return to a local profile and risk students bemoaning their lost work and that PCs are easier because My Documents works or do I stick with a simpler file managent system and sluggish (even unusable!) applications? Some days I hate computers…