Lessons Learned from the Design & Development of MovieMaker Project

Prior to this project, I had used MovieMaker a handful of times before—leading my students in very simple projects to expose them to the software and also making end of the year photo albums for some elementary teachers. This project was a little more challenging. I think one of the hardest parts was coming up with a topic and then working on a way to make the topic come alive for viewers. I went with the character education topic tolerance with an emphasis on forgiveness. It was a challenge to add sound that flowed smoothly and it was hard to choose the type of music. I didn’t want the video to seem depressing, but I also didn’t want it to be too upbeat. My hope was that people would think about someone in their life that they need to forgive. Working with MovieMaker is relatively easy, yet very tedious to apply each effect and each transition. It was also a little frustrating to time things just right. Overall it really is a useful program. I hope to do a MovieMaker assignment next semester with my students. I am thinking about letting them do the words to a song like you might see on YouTube. I am hoping they will be interested in that; however, it will be challenging to get the timings right. I am really looking forward to checking out everyone else’s projects. I already looked at one about “being different”, and it looked so professional! I was very impressed.