Digital Story

What I liked:
I liked how easy it was to drag and drop the pictures into the project and also how easy it was to overlap text and sound onto the pictures. I thought it was very user friendly and easy to find the things that I needed to add to the movie. I also liked that you could move your cursor around on the movie and start it from whichever point you wanted. This allowed me to see the changes I made without having to play the movie from the beginning each time.

What I did not like:
I am not sure if it was the actual iMovie app or just a problem with my computer, but many times when I would add something, like text, my photos would disappear. I would have to close the program and reopen it in order to make the photos show back up so that I could determine whether or not my text was in a good location and was showing up. I also did not like that you do not have many options to edit your text. Sometimes if the text was hard to see on a dark background, I wanted to make the white banner more opaque but there was no option to do so. I also liked a text option that matched my intro and credit slide, but the banner was green and had font that was hard to read and there was no way to edit those things in order to make the movie more uniform looking.

What I would change:
I would make it to where when you added songs and text, you could edit the timing of them before you even add it to the movie. Dragging it onto the movie and then trying to find the beginning of the song and clicking on the gear to edit it and all of that took up a lot of time and I think it would be easier to just choose a song or text to add, type in how many seconds you want it to last, and THEN add it to the movie. I would also change the layout so that the actual project could be bigger to view instead of having it be a small box in the top left corner with a huge open empty space taking up the entire lower part of the screen.

Classroom Use:
I think this would be a difficult tool to use for young children in elementary school. I think it would be a fun project for the entire class to work on in a middle school or high school classroom, but I definitely think that the younger children would not be able to overlap music and text and edit the Ken Burs effect, etc. because it was confusing even for me at first and I think it would be much too difficult for them.