The Reviews Are In

“Integrating media production in your curriculum can help you find new access to students and help them find new access to the material.” (Garrison, 1999)

I am always interested in providing new access for my students and I am always looking for new ways to cover the material. This approach helps to keep the material fresh for me and my students. Several semesters ago I set a personal goal to either add one new piece of technology, or to introduce a new way to use existing technology, to one class per semester. This week I evaluated two pieces of software that will help to accomplish this goal.
This review will cover Movie Maker and Wax video editing software. Both software packages are available as free downloads and you can learn how to use both of them by viewing one or more of several online tutorials. I did not start with the tutorials, however, because I wanted to see how difficult it was to just jump into a project, which is how my students would likely approach a movie project. Here is what I learned:

Movie Maker
This piece of software is from Microsoft. One of Microsoft’s strengths is that its software is usually easy to dive into. This offering is no different. The interface is not crowed with a lot of icons and buttons which might intimidate some new users. In fact, the layout of the interface almost walks users through the steps to create their first movie. Once the user has imported the video that they will work with they can complete the editing process using the familiar drag-and-drop function. This simple program is even powerful enough to easily remove existing audio and allow the user to replace it with either music or narration. All in all I believe that this software ranks high on the user friendly scale.

Wax
My first impression of this software is that it is more powerful than Movie Maker with a different target audience. This immediately makes me wonder if it is appropriate for use in the classroom. The interface is not as friendly as Movie Maker but I do figure out how to add video so that I can begin to work on a project. Once the video is added to the software you are able to drag the video track to the timeline. You have to drag the audio track to the timeline separately but this means that you can choose what you would like to use as the audio track for the resulting edited video. This would be great if the audio worked.
I tried multiple fixes and downloads to try to fix this issue. I even watched tutorials and read the documentation for the software but could not ever get the audio to play. It seems that this is a common problem that some but not all users are able to fix. So no matter how good all the other features may be there is no way that I could recommend using this software in a classroom.

Garrison, Andres (1999, Winter). Video basics and production projects for the classroom. Center for Media Literacy. Retrieved September 3, 2010, from http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article3.html