Thursday, November 3, 2011

PE1_iMovie

Growing up, I have always been a PC girl.  Well, besides those small stints at school when I used the old-school Apple machines with the green screens.  Those were the days when Oregon Trail NEVER got old!  Then, when I reached high school, the Internet started to take off and I used the computer a lot more for research and IM chatting with friends.  I would do assignments, store photos, search the web…the list goes on. 

After I got my teaching credential I taught at a school that had Macs in their computer lab and I was supposed to be the one teaching the kids how to use them.  Well, it was more like they were the ones teaching me. :P  Then, I came to SJUSD and on the first day of the job they handed me a Macbook and said “Good luck!  Make wonders happen.”  Since then I can almost 100% say that I have converted over, but I still want to keep up with my PC usage just so I can still remember what it’s like.

With that being said, I am grateful for this program and I am excited to be using all of this new technology that I owned, but never bothered to try out.  In this sense, that’s where I come running to Lynda.com!  This wonderful resource has been a gift from the Techie Gods!  I love that you can find just about anything on that site.

At first, I was a bit skeptical about having to sit through a 3 ½ hr training video on iMovie (after using it for 3 months now without any training), but now I see why this training happened after the fact.  We could have sat through this training and been totally overwhelmed with each new concept…not knowing where to begin or remember what command did what function, but I now have to background knowledge (prior usage and mistakes) to help me really get good at using the program. 

In the beginning, I remember sitting there struggling a bit just to make things happen, but eventually I picked up enough knowledge to get by on some of the assignments (which, by the way, totally helped that they were 0% assignments…meaning 0% stress of failure).  From there I gained the confidence to try new things and branch out to incorporate at least one new thing in my videos.

I sat there last night, watching the first third of the training and I felt like it was everything that I already knew.  I couldn’t wait for the next clip to start and was kind of getting bored, but then I realized that it was only boring because I was comparing my survival learning experience to the legit training video.  But, every once in a while I would catch a part that made me feel silly because the tutorial showed me the proper way of executing a task, while I used my own makeshift version (aka the roundabout way) to get something done. :P

One thing that I really enjoyed learning about was all of the organizational features—tagging, rating, moving clips to another hard drive, and the people search.  I am huge on organization in my real-life outside of the computer, so when I can organize everything in my computer it makes me feel so good inside.  HAHA!  Tagging video clips is going to be one of my favorite features for iMovie!  I can see it now!  If you can just imagine me with a label making machine...labeling everything known to man, then you have a good idea of how I will attack my video clips from now on.  Some people consider themselves to be a "Love Machine."  Well, I...will be a TAGGING MACHINE!


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