As you all know, I am currently working towards earning a degree in digital learning and leading from Lamar University.  My current course is all about professional development.  I have thoroughly enjoyed this course so far because professional development is kind of a passion for me.  I hope to be an instructional technologist one day which would mean I would be providing a lot of professional development for teachers.  If you are a teacher, you know that we sit through hours of professional development, and most of the time we don’t get much out of it.  While reading all of the research behind professional development I wasn’t too shocked to read how ineffective professional development is.  My first assignment was to create a presentation for a call to action to change professional development into a more effective model.  I was excited to complete this project, but I really did struggle quite a bit with this assignment.  Why you ask?  A three to four-minute video that tells a story and asks for change seemed like a massive project.  I couldn’t wrap my head around a story that would move someone.  Everything I came up with seemed not good enough.  I ended up discussing it with my coworkers.  We all agreed that we would love to see professional development personalized for teachers as well.  We all have different needs and different levels of learning.  I am very tech savvy and would not need the sessions a teacher that is not comfortable with technology would need.  I’m still not sure that my video is totally moving, but I learned a lot along the way.

When I make videos, I usually create them in Windows movie maker.  I have a PC, and it’s very easy to create movies using this software.  Now I do enjoy adding in a few things that movie maker can not make such as animation.  For this video, I did use the app Chatterpix which enables you to make photos talk.  I wanted to have just a little bit of silly to bring my audience in or give them a laugh.  I love this app, because it is so simple.  I use it in my first grade classroom all the time.  You add your picture in, draw a mouth on it, and record what you want to say.  Very simple!  I was able to download the small video to my camera roll and upload it into movie maker.  movie maker allows you to enter videos and images.  You can also add in narration.