Cat on a Rollercoaster: Using iMovie with young children

One way of using iMovie with children is to incorporate their natural imaginative play into a narrative. For this video, I helped Solana think of a beginning and then she became the director and began to add onto the story. We recorded the entire video in Photobooth: I'm still having some issues getting the backgrounds such as the rollercoaster in this video to look natural. I did something similar with my ESL student as a way of working on beginning, middle and ending. At the end of the year, I gave my student a DVD with her iMovie project and a slideshow of images from the year which her family enjoyed watching at home.

Teachers creating digital stories

At one school, I'm working with middle school teachers of special education to create our own short digital stories as a way of modelling for students as well as familiarizing ourselves with this form of communication. Here are a few short examples teachers created their first time using IMovie. The first, "Labrador Retriever" by Sherilynn Saporito, is an example of how you could use Imovie, powerpoint, Moviemaker, photostory or another program to have students write about content in a science or social studies course. The second, "Dallas" by Katrina Hammerl, is one I'm most interested in: telling a personal story using music, words and images.

Imovie rules

I'm experimenting with digital stories using Imovie with a group of middle school teachers. I can't even begin to describe how much better Imovie is than Windows Moviemaker: yet another example of how Macs are superior. This is a quick short I created with some flip cam summer footage (mostly filmed by Solana-- more shaky camera action). (Thanks, Eileen!!)