Day 8: Social Videos & Movie Maker 7

Just remember, "A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 people working 20 years make." I may have come close to breaking that record today. It was a day of the group working closely to bring all the bits of video, text, and audio together to make a social video about appropriate behaviour in a school library.

Carol Gray first introduced educators to Social Stories for children with autism spectrum disorders about twenty years ago.

Today, our team of four learned through experience how to

• use an IPP to initiate the script
• script a story for creation in Movie Maker
• use an iPod nano to capture video
• edit the video, titles/credits, captions, and audio to create a video project
• use a converter to create a video in mp4 format (which can be posted to the WWW on sites like Blogger.com or YouTube)

There was a lot going on, for sure! We persevered despite some video capture difficulties and we had a number of giggle bloopers to choose from. Yet again, I saw how important it is for every member of the team to "buy" in and to contribute to the collective effort. There were no experts on our team, but the collective efforts resulted in a 2:20 video that we can present tomorrow.

I am also thinking that using Movie Maker to create these videos could be a great enrichment activity for the right team of students and teachers. Some gifted children at a local high school have formed a video production club. perhaps with my help and the new Itinerant for Assistive Technology, Krista Baldwin, those young videographers could help a classmate. And they could earn recognition and real-life experience for themselves. A win-win possibility here!

Although it's only my first experience using the ideas of FACTER (Functional Assessment and Curriculum for teaching Everyday Routines), I like that it starts with an assessment of the student and then deliberately plans to combine ongoing teaching and insstructional supports with goals of more independence at its core.

Gotta go for the night. Thank heavens that Kerry from Everything Computers in Coldharbour is good at problem solving. I hit the wall with a deffective keyboard this afternoon in a 2-month-old laptop. So for about five hours I had big concerns that our team might not be able to present tomorrow. But a way was found (so I need to carry a USB keyboard around for the next couple of days) while the warranty keyboard finds its way from the Dell warehouse to me in Wolfville. The silver lining was that I got to meet Kerry and Dwayne. Two dudes!!

If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist (so says the Murphy's Law site.) And if you can't get at it through the human interface of the keyboard, it's just as well it wasn't there (so says Terry)!