Using+Videos

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 * Windows MovieMaker **

Definition: Create & Edit Homemade Video from PowerPoint Slides

Windows Movie Maker is video creating/editing software bundled with the Microsoft Windows operating system. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

Tutorial: PowerPoint to YouTube using Windows Movie Maker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZmOVt_BIAE

Here is the student handout:

It explains the step-by-step process to the students.

Hi! I did the following with the movie **Mr & Mrs Smith** with an upper intermediate class which had recently dealt with Conditional sentences: at home I played the movie and recorded twenty short bits from beginning to end. Then I prepared a worksheet to practice Conditional 3 and Mixed Conditionals. In the classroom, I played the first bit which showed Angelina and Brad when they first met at a hotel. Many officers were raiding the hotel looking for men or women who were staying there alone. They fitted that profile, so they pretended to be together to avoid getting arrested. The first sentence in the exercise said:

//if they / not meet in the lobby, they / not fall in love//

The students were supposed to write full sentences choosing which conditional fitted best in each situation.

//If they hadn't met in the lobby, they wouldn't have fallen in love with each other.//

Then I went on with the next bit and students worked in pairs building the sentences. At the end of the activity, we checked altogether.

I had worked with parts of videos before, and in all the cases at the end of the activity, students insisted on watching the rest of the movie (even if they had already seen it) probably just to waste time. :o) There was a sense of incompletion, of something missing. I've discovered that working with bits of videos from the beginning, bits from the middle and bits from the end of one movie, students don't ask to see the rest because, and that's my personal point of view, they feel as if they had seen the whole movie by watching the most important bits. Am I making any sense? Another thing I've noticed is that students don't complain that they have already seen the film before when the activity itself and the playing of the video is done in an agile way.

As regards length, I believe that these kinds of exercises should last between twenty and thirty minutes.

I hope somebody finds this useful! Betty from Misiones, Argentina