I have been a big fan of iMovie on the Mac ever since I had to learn it really quickly and stressfully to produce a slideshow for my Dad's retirement party. Ever since then I have found it, in its various iterations (we are now on iMovie '09) to be a pretty intuitive way to produce a nice movie. At my elementary school, I became known as "the slideshow guy," and that moniker has followed me up to middle school, though in truth I usually use iPhoto to arrange the photos and music in a way that looks much harder than it is. When Apple announced they were releasing a version for iPhone, I thought that seemed logical and a great idea.
I gave the app ($4.99 at the app store) a try last night, using some of the snapshots I have taken this year to update families in my weekly emails home after private practice group sessions. It was, again, way easy to use. You can pick from 5 "themes" that affect how the photos or video are displayed, with accompanying titles and music. Problem is, I could not get the title editor to come up though I tried following the directions exactly. Anyway, I am sure I/they will figure that out. You can use the theme-based music or anything from your iTunes library. It was midnight and I made this while lying in bed (ha!) so I didn't persist in trying to make anything too fancy. I LOVED that I could upload it directly to YouTube, skipping the plug-into-computer steps necessary with Flip video and other pocket video cameras. This is a montage of photos related to therapy, including:
-A "goodbye" picture a student drew for me. I love it because he so clearly associated me with Story Grammar Marker, which shows that he "got it"
-A picture I sent to a parent to show how we were using Thememaker magnets to learn the difference between the text structures of List and Sequence.
-Several images on how we were using The Incredible 5-point Scale in therapy
-A map of a local Dunkin Donuts I made before a group community trip in order to talk about the "schema" and expected behaviors for that location.
Language Lens
Movies like this one are much simpler to make than you think! A short movie can emphasize work, concepts, and events to parents or students and would be very motivating to watch. iMovie for iPhone can be used to produce social stories and scripted role-plays, or to provide video feedback on session behaviors. It's a great tool for SLPs!
What about you? What is your experience with iMovie and using video in therapy. How would having iMovie on your phone be helpful to you?
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I, too, downloaded iMovie on my iPhone 4. Since I didn't immediately find all the editing features, I visited Apple's support pages. Luckily, they have good tutorials for the iMovie app. They enabled me to easily use the editing features including deleting clip segments and adding media and transitions. The one thing I discovered, however, is the iMovie app doesn't allow HD video upload to YouTube. Other than that, I think it has good speech-language uses for creating app user demos and social stories.
ReplyDeleteI like it too, however, I realized that the reason I could not access the title editor was because you can't put titles on still images. Given that a still image "becomes" a video in iMovie, complete with Ken Burns effect, I think that is kinda silly. Hopefully they will add that functionality.
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