Do not text and drive!

Video taping scenes for the PSA on texting while driving was fun. There were four people in the video, John, Kristy (his girlfriend), Jeremy (my son), and me. Fred, the dog, was also a very willing participant. We all collaborated on the scenes and dialog, but John was the main director. He actually hung off the side of a truck to tape some scenes! We searched for sad music on Youtube and I was surprised at how many we had to choose from.

Next he and I discussed all the different ways we could use the video in conjunction with different transitions and music. We could have the video play without sound except for sad background music and have scrolling printed statistics, or just our voices stating the statistics as the video plays with sad background music, etc. All these different scenarios brought us to our final video composition.

This was my first try at editing a video. I have made many family videos but never used software to edit out sections or add transitions and music. We taped ourselves stating statistics of driving while texting but decided not to use our own voices in favor of printing our statistics and using them as transitions in the video. We then inserted the statistic next to the best video clip. Since our video clips have an audio part of us talking, we added our sad music as a second (background) audio.

It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed the learning experience. Since the first clips we captured and edited were corrupted when we saved the video, we got to do it all over again. It is really amazing to me how minutely you can edit a video. This helped me get a lot of practice and since I have never done this before, and I needed it.

Videos in the classroom can be invaluable. Apart from just showing a science video, such as Bill Nye the Science Guy, videos can be interactive. As a science teacher I could show interactive videos depicting, active volcanoes, seismic studies of earthquakes, life science studies, etc., all with sections for student participation. These engaging videos help to bring science alive for the middle school age group that I will be teaching.