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=**Online Editing** =

Overview:
As teachers include more digital creation in the projects they assign, the challenge becomes providing tools that allow students to edit their pictures, videos, and audio content. While some tools are fairly easy to find (Windows has Movie Maker and Macs have iMovie) other tools are not considered standard. PCs have overtaken Macs in most educational settings so, although the Mac has photo, audio, and video editors in the iLife suite, those who use Windows have are left without an audio editor, the Paint program which is to photo editing what Notepad is to a word processing application, and Movie Maker (or Windows Live Movie Maker if you have Vista or 7). While Movie Maker is a serviceable program for video editing (and free!), Windows is lacking in both photo and audio editing.  One key question certainly may be are these editors even needed? Your answer depends on your approach to teaching and your beliefs about //who// we are teaching. The latest term to describe today’s learner is “digital natives” due to the continual presence of digital resource in their lives (Prensky, 2001). As these students have always used digital resources, they expect their learning experiences to include such resources. When they are included, “students often find this work exhilarating and perceive these tasks as deeply relevant and highly contextual” (Kearney and Schuck, 2006). Having students view work as “deeply relevant” is certainly a positive as engaged students are students who are, well, learning. Many educators have noticed that student achievement suffers when students feel bored or otherwise disinterested. While learners in the past have “plowed through it,” these digital natives know that there are better options out there because they use them! Some educators have responded by shifting from a teacher centered classroom to a student centered one (Prensky 2008) where students are encouraged to construct their learning experience with the course content. Although certainly not an abdication of the leadership role of the teacher, it is instead a refinement of the idea of leader to that of a guide; a semantic difference perhaps, but, when applied, results in students interacting with the content and developing products that show their understanding and application of course content. The educational shift represents a change from rewarding rote memorization to focusing on how the student understands the content and is able to show that understanding through what they create. This brings us back around to photo, audio, and video editing and whether or not they are important tools for teachers and students. Thanks to technology, students are able to easily use images, audio, and video sources to create the previously described products. Ranker (2008) saw that students who were struggling with writing using these sources were able to develop high quality videos that reflected the assigned content and were able to turn that experience into well written texts. Bremer and McGeehan (2006) saw a similar effect when looking at an interdisciplinary unit that combined technology and Spanish. Another positive application of technology is its use as a tool for differentiating instruction (Attwell, 2007). Differentiation is certainly a hot topic in education and one that can be supported by using technology to allow students to develop projects and use resources that best match their needs and that show their understanding of course content. It is clear that the integration of technology as a means to “show what you know” is one that creates positive results. 

For this project, I chose to focus on photo, audio, and video editors because these are tools that students can use to manipulate, reorder, and re-envision course content yet they are tools that are not ubiquitous. Part of the issue is knowledge of the tools; many teachers do not know what Movie Maker is let alone whether or not they have it on their computer. While a growing number of students are aware of it, many do not realize that there are simple ways to alter the pictures that they choose to use in their creations. Even those who may want to do not have a means to do so (unless they have a Mac). Audio editing is truly an un-thought-of possibility; taking snippets of music, mixing them together and adding audio is a terrific way for students to add more of what they know to a project but it rarely occurs. Schools are hesitant to buy site or district licenses for software that may be seldom used due to the step cost of many popular programs (like Adobe’s Photoshop) so these powerful applications remain out of reach for most of these digital natives. With cost in mind, I searched for free editors. I further narrowed my search to focus on free online applications for several reasons. The first reason, too many applications on computers that are too old, is one that I am currently suffering through. When districts establish an image for their computers, they include as many applications as they feel are important for all computers to have. The more applications, the more memory is used and the slower the computer works. This makes online applications particularly attractive; there is no software to load as the entire application exists online. This leads to a second consideration, that of storage space. Many districts require users to sign on to computers. This means that anything saved to that particular computer may not be there the next time that user goes back to that particular machine. A way around this is to have remote drives that are unique to each user and that users can store data on and access from any computer. One can see, however, that this can require a lot of space as more teachers and students use these remote drives. The sites I chose all store user’s creations on their servers which removes any concerns about storage space. Finally, and most obviously, purchasing software in a tight economy when free resources are available just doesn’t seem wise. With these self-imposed guidelines, I found three web-based resources to focus on; the Aviary suite of applications, FotoFlexor (an image editor), and OneTrueMedia (a video editor). 

The Aviary suite is free, but it does require a login (and a valid email address). This is a very interesting group of applications. Phoenix is a photo editor that performs similarly to Photoshop or Fireworks. The positive is that this means that Phoenix is a powerful tool; the downside is that it is a tool that requires time to learn. Aviary includes several editors that I had not thought of. Peacock is used to create a wide array of digital effects. You can develop color palettes in Toucan and test your palette to see how individuals with different types of color blindness would see your colors (great if you are choosing a color scheme for a web-page). Raven allows you to create vector images that can be enlarged to any size without any degradation of the image while Falcon, and its FireFox add-on Talon, is a mark-up editor that allows you to quickly add arrows, boxes, circles, and/or text to images or screen captures. These tools are of varying difficulty and uses which is why I included a simpler photo editor; FotoFlexor. Where Phoenix is on par with expensive commercial software, FotoFlexor simplifies many of those tools to create an editor that is immediately usable by even the most novice of user. A second benefit is that it does not require an account be created (and an email address provided) in order to edit pictures. These picture editing tools are not well represented in research into their benefit in educational settings. Fontes (2008) describes how photo editors can be used in art classes to help students develop their own art work while Prensky (2007) maintains that mobile phone cameras should be considered an indispensible tool of education due to the wide variety of uses that the collected images could be put to. Landry’s dissertation (2007) focused on how digital picture can be used to improve storytelling and enhance comprehension. All of these resources bring up the same point; pictures can be powerful tools when students are allowed to use them to show their degree of comprehension. By giving students the means to alter these photos so only critical aspects are included adds to the depth of understanding these images show.  There is another tool in Aviary; appropriately named Myna. It is an audio editor that comes with a wide variety of clips and allows you to import sounds/music into the editor and to record directly into Myna. A surprisingly easy editor to use, Myna gives users a lot of options and effects as they develop their audio recording. The inclusion of audio clips allows students to add music to narration or video projects without worrying about copyright infringement and Fair Use policies. The ability to create narration is truly a powerful aspect of Myna. Movie Maker, the typical video editing software found on computers in schools, only allows for one track of audio; you get music or talking, but not both. Using Myna, students can create their narration with music, save the track as a single audio piece (mp3 or wma), import it into Movie Maker and adjust their video as needed to match their narration. Audio editors are not directly addressed in literature, but the concept of giving students the tools that they need so they can create their own content certainly is (Ranker, 2008; Prensky, 2007; Landry, 2007; and Kearney and Schuck, 2006). The constructivist approach to teaching can certainly be aided by an audio editor such as Myna. 

Although video editing is, to me, a critical culmination of photo and audio editing, I was a bit disappointed in OneTrueMedia. As with the Aviary suite, you can do more if you pay for the premium service but, while there was a lot you could do with the free version of Aviary, OneTrueMedia seemed to have omnipresent “premium” options. Despite this advertising issue, OneTrueMedia is a serviceable video editor. I particularly liked the ability to cut videos at specific one-second intervals. The ability to narrate, however, was missing unless you uploaded a recorded narration into your project. I also looked into Jaycut (an online video editor that I had heard positive things about) but they are currently in a re-launch which made them impossible to use. Video editors, like photo and audio editors, are excellent tools to give students as they develop products that demonstrate their understanding of course content, but video editing seems to have caught the attention of more researchers. As mentioned, Kearney and Schuck (2006) focused on how video editing can engage students. Waring (2005) provides details on how video editing can be used to make a social studies lesson that may be a bit dry, creating a timeline, far more interesting. Children in this digital age are surrounded and bombarded by images and video editors allow them to take advantage of their knowledge of images as a means to develop culminating projects (Siegle, 2009) or as a step towards developing a written product (Ranker, 2008); a type of digital rough draft if you will. Hada, Ogata, and Yano (2002) have an interesting idea regarding language development. They suggest that editing video of previous real-time sessions with a native speaker will act as a review for the language learner and reinforce the knowledge that was gained. What a powerful tool that could be; to provide students with the tools to allow them to edit class discussions so the videos the student uses to review are focused on aspects that were most important to them. 

Photo, audio, and video editors are powerful tools that allow students to create their own content as well as rearrange presented information into formats that better match their learning styles and areas of self-perceived needs. Although the effects of these tools are not well documented yet in literature, the presence of many free options and the growing body of research make them excellent applications to present to students. 

References:

Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments – the Future of eLearning?. //eLeaning Papers, 2//(1).

Bremer, J., & McGeehan, L. (2006). Teaming Foreign Language with Technology. //Library Media Connection//, //24//(4), 53-55. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

Fontes, K. (2008). Scanner as a Fine Art. //SchoolArts: The Art Education Magazine for Teachers//, //107//(9), 38-39. Retrieved from ERIC database

Hada, Y., Ogata, H., & Yano, Y. (2002). Video-Based Language Learning Environment Using an Online Video-Editing System. //Computer Assisted Language Learning: An International Journal//, //15//(4), 387-408. doi:10.1076/call.15.4.387.8273.

Kearney, M., & Schuck, S. (2006). Spotlight on Authentic Learning: Student Developed Digital Video Projects. //Australasian Journal of Educational Technology//, //22//(2), 189-208. Retrieved from ERIC database.

Landry, B. (2007). Storytelling for Digital Photographs: Supporting the Practice, Understanding the Benefit. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States -- Georgia

Prensky, M. (2008). The Role of Technology in Teaching and the Classroom. //Educational Technology//, //48//(6), 64. Retrieved February 2, 2010, from Education Full Text database.

Prensky, M. (2007). How to teach with technology: keeping both teachers and students comfortable. //Emerging Technologies for Learning Vol. 2// (pp. 39-46). Coventry, UK: British Educational Communications and Technology Agency.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. //On the Horizon//, //9//(5), 1004-1019. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00823.

Ranker, J. (2008). Composing Across Multiple Media: A Case Study of Digital Video Production in a Fifth Grade Classroom. //Written Communication//, //25//(2), 196-234. doi:10.1177/0741088307313021. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">

Siegle, D. (2009). Literacy in the 21st Century: The Fourth R--Video Recording. //Gifted Child Today//, //32//(2), 14-19. Retrieved from ERIC database. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 132%;">Waring, S. (2005). Digital Video Editing Software and Timelines. //Media & Methods//, //41//(4), 10. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

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