I really enjoyed this class. I found working with the video editing programs and H5P. I think that they’ll both be really useful tools for education. I particularly like H5P. It seems like a really good way of making sure that students are engaged with video content and being reminded of the key ideas that I may be trying to focus on. It definitely isn’t something that can substitute making the videos engaging by their own merits, but it’s a good chance to subtly help students get back on track if their minds start to wander (something that I personally need to wrestle with a ton).

I found that this lecture-structure worked a lot better for me than the other lectures too. I’m genuinely not entirely sure how well I would’ve handled a full lecture. I tend to lose a grip on really long classes that focus mostly on lecturing without a ton of other things to break them up. Today was particularly bad because I doctor’s appointment via phone later on in the day and was pretty anxious because of that. It made me pretty fidgety and I was struggling a bit to engage with the material normally. I was also worried about the fidgeting itself being distracting for other people.

Getting the chance to do some of the workshop exercises in class really saved me. It was a bit difficult for me at first because I was struggling to read the instructions with all the conversations going on around me. I found that putting in my earbuds but not playing anything through them worked pretty well to help tune things out a bit. I got into a rhythm with working once I was doing it steadily too. I got through most of the iMovie workshop and the H5P workshop. I was really interested in learning more about video editing going into this course and I think that really helped me get engaged with the workshops. I found them to be really helpful too. I have some experience with video editing software but I mostly tend to use it on the fly. Having a guide that walks through the different elements of it is really nice. I would mostly just try to figure out how to make something work through trial and error. When I did look up how to do things it was normally just specific tasks and didn’t give me a bigger picture of how the programs work.

I really like the way that the workshops were set up and I think that they’re phenomenal resources to have. I’ll also be checking out some of the other workshops that Rich McCue runs to see if there’s subjects that interest me.

Workshop links:

  • Video editing software
    • Openshot (windows)
    • iMovie (Mac)
    • Davinci Resolve
      • Not one of the guides that was given to use, but Rich McCue discussed it a bit with me. It sounds like a really good free video editing software, albeit a bit more advanced than Openshot or iMovie.
  • Podcasting
  • H5P

(There are way more workshops as well, these are just the ones that were brought up in class)