Making Movies in a One iPad Classroom

So how do you film and edit videos with 27 students, 3 production groups and a few iPod Touches?

It can be done!

I've been around long enough to remember searching the internet for articles on the "One Computer Classroom" - Do you remember these articles? Circa 1997. My grade 4/5 class had one computer in it, no internet and just what was I to do with such a device?

This week we began the 21st century version of the one device per classroom question. Our challenge was to film three separate groups of No Bullying productions on our school provided iPod Touch devices. It would have been all well and good to edit our movies on iPod Touch in iMovie, but I thought it might be good if a group of 2 or 3 students could edit sitting around the device. And the iPod Touch is just too small for such a purpose.

Enter the iPad Camera Connection Kit. Just a couple of USB adapters, really. I had purchased a set quite a while back to go along with my iPad 1 to import my photos from my Canon camera. I poked around the help menu in iMovie and I read that you can transfer video from iPod Touch over to iPad, as pictured above.

Problem solved!

What with re-shoots and different camera angles, we could now have a 2 or 3 camera shoot, with different camera angles and then connect the iPod Touch to the iPad and have all the footage ready to edit.

So that's what we did. Each of the three groups sent their editors to our editing room (my office) and off they went creating their movie using iMovie on iPad. None of the students had used iMovie on an iPad before. The results are terrific! The iPad takes crystal clear movies. The student editors learned iMovie in minutes and the process is now much easier than in the past.

Up until our school purchases we were using Flips and Zi8s to record video, import the footage onto our one machine that is fast enough to edit video and then started the laborious process of editing and don't even remind me about rendering... Yikes!

So there you go. You can teach an old dog new tricks. I look forward to assisting our students and teachers with our new devices to shoot and edit movies. So easy!

If you've already done this and have some advice, please let me know in the comments.