Student-led Lesson on Video:
For this lesson, I used a PowerPoint presentation that included several videos that I wanted to share with the class. Two of the videos I wanted to share were part of a Prezi which I had linked to within the PowerPoint, but that I was unable to access by clicking during my presentation. I solved this problem by logging into Carmen and loading the Prezi from there. I had no trouble playing the other videos, except for some minor lagging issues that could not have been avoided. I emailed the PowerPoint to myself before class so that I would not have to worry about remembering the file on a jump drive.
Micro-teaching #1:
Scott and I had some technical difficulties when we were trying to get the hang of using Carmen Connect. It ended up being a good thing that our presentation was pushed back, because I had been unable to access the new Connect session at home and I am not sure I would have been able to navigate our presentation without any practice. I later figured out that I could only access the new Connect session through Internet Explorer and not through Mozilla Firefox. Since we ended up with a bit of extra time, Scott and I stayed in the Connect session on the day we had thought we were going to present and he helped me familiarizing myself with the program’s capabilities. Because of this, we were able to smoothly deliver our presentation the next week without any hiccups in our technology usage.
Micro-teaching #2:
Narmada and I decided to each make a video of us reading a picture book to use for our lesson. I was able to make mine easily using the software I had at home, but when we tried to meet to work on Narmada’s together on campus we were stuck without any access to one of the computer labs that has iMovie or Macs. As a result, we began her movie in Windows Movie Maker. There were some strange issues where the pictures she inserted into the video kept showing up on the screen upside down when we put the video on other computers, while they looked correct on her laptop. We had to spend some time converting the file to be able to open it in iMovie because we wanted to be able to fix the upside down images as well as add the background music. However, I am not as familiar with iMovie and we could not figure out how to rotate the image or fade out the music at the end. We ran out of time to access the lab while trying to fix these issues, so instead Narmada sent the files to me and I finished editing the video on my computer at home. Then, on the day of our lesson, I had issues getting the files to upload to my Google Docs account because they were so large. After waiting more than an hour for the upload to complete, it was still unfinished. So instead, I put the files onto a jump drive and got to class early to place them on the desktop of the main computer. After that, there were no more issues with the technology we used. Phew!