Our group actually used several tools to complete the final product. We began with a PowerPoint to set up the storyboard and there are several slides from that presentation that ended up in the final product. We also made extensive use of screencast o matic to add the audio to the pieces of the project. It is a pretty neat tool as it is web-based unlike jing so there is no need to download and install anything. It also gives options to save the screencast in multiple formats. The other thing that it allowed us to do was actually show a Smart Board in action which says far more than the words we put with it ever could. We used the .mp4 format which I believe is more useful when it came to editing and producing the final product with iMovie.
It was difficult to put together the final product as we had several smaller videos that needed to be spliced together to create the final one. We ran into some issues with my portion of the presentation not playing nicely with my groupmates. For what ever reason it would not play correctly on their computers at school but they were able to get it into the presentation by using a different machine. I thought this was really strange since I, like them, used screencast-o-matic to make it. We also had a difficult time integrating all the pieces, probably due to the fact that we were in so many different places on the project. We would run into a tech issue and changes would be made to the project to fix the issue but not all of would know about exactly what the change was until it ended up causing another issue. Our method of group work was definitely more stressful than it has been in the other group projects I have done so far in the program. Whereas before we always scheduled meeting times where we actually produced the project, in this group we split it into pieces and did our own thing and then tried to bring it back into the group setting.
If I had this to do over again I would definitely like to have a document online i.e. google docs, where we could all edit the same thing either together or as individuals. Emailing around a PowerPoint where people added their changes as we went slowed us down. People were stuck waiting for others to finish their parts before they made edits to avoid having eight different copies of the presentation in circulation.
Overall I think the final product is pretty good. We each brought our own unique set of skills to it that combined well and you can check out our final product below.
It was wonderful to hear that the production phase of your tutorial was somewhat of a bumpy one. However, your group did a tremendous job of trouble shooting and selecting the proper tools to get the "job" done. It was a little disheartening to hear that collaboration strategies used for building the storyboard was so problematic. One idea to think about for future projects would be a shared Google doc or presentation - that way everybody has 24/7 access to the information.
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