Editing Adventure

Today was a continuation of yesterday's class on creating video social stories.  Our group (Terry, Darlene, Lorraine and myself) decided yesterday after working with Movie Maker and doing our first draft of the Mirror Social Story, that we would now do a second one, for our class presentation assignment, on a student that one of us has worked with in the past or will again this coming school year.  Darlene discussed a student that she has who has a need for needing a social cuing system when she goes to the library. 
She is not able to sit still and has difficulties as she will often run around in the library.  In addition, she also is very rough with books in the library and has even torn pages out of the book. This little girl is 9 years old, is profoundly autistic, has a very rudimentary level of expressive language skills (she can say a few words that are of high interest to her...ex. candy).  In addition, she has good comprehension skills and we felt it would be a fabulous idea to develop a social story for her related to the Library.  This would be relevant for Darlene and would definitely be something that she could take back to her school to use with this child.

So, we discussed the development of the Social Story Script - which Darlene had written the previous night.  We referred to the MPTTT model and discussed whether or not we included all elements in our social story.  The milieu (or environment) would be the library; the personality of the student was such that we knew she would be able to handle watching a video social story as she responds to video, also we felt it was important for her teacher to be in the video as the child so that she could see her teacher as the model for the expected behaviors.  In terms of the task, we wanted this little girl to be able to walk in the line with her class to library, be patient and wait for others in library, to be able to walk while in the library and listen to the librarian as well as use gentle hands with books in the library.  This was a great deal of skills that we were building in with this Social Story, but will definitely assist the child in functioning at a more appropriate level while in the library.  The time used for this task was while she was in the library.  Also, the technology used would be an iPod Nano to create the movie and be able to play this back for the child on the computer once it was edited, scripted and voice overs were completed.  The child responds well to technology, so she would be able to view this many times with her teacher, Educational Program Assistant and other staff in the school.  She would also get to practice this as well for a number of times before she would be ready to do this with any independence.  Our video shows the child at the independent stage, meaning that they do not require the video.  They can still reinforce the expected behaviors by having her watch the video, but we have her using a task strip as well when she is in the library with pictures velcroed on so that she can refer to the behavior expectations for her while in the library.  This will be helpful for her as it is soft to the touch and is a visual source of stimulation and can be something for her to use if her anxiety gets a little too much.  She would be able to fiddle with it a bit or look at it to calm herself down, which she does require from time to time.

So, we set out to make our video...I won't tell you too much about the video itself as I want you to see it during our class presentation tomorrow!  However, I would like to say that our group worked very well together.  We discussed our shots and the text that would go with the shot.  We discussed how we saw this looking for our video and then we set about recording sections.  The next steps were to upload the video from the iPod Nano to Terry's computer where we could then convert it to the type of file necessary for us to edit the video on Movie Maker.  The editing section was fun!   We got to be creative and add in text, move the text boxes around, change the font color so the text would stand out and also add in transition pages so the video flowed nicely.  The voice over part was easy to do as well.  Once we had the text matched up to the clip on the video, it was merely a matter of creating a sound recording by reading the words as they appeared in the frames.  When we were in the editing stage we were very particular about editing precisely to what we wanted to say in our Social Story that we already had developed.  So, we knew what the key messages were for the child and we wanted to make sure we edited effectively to meet these goals as this would make it easier to add the voice over in later.  So, as I said, it was merely a matter of reading the text as it appeared in the clipped sections. 

We got a little creative at the end with a few things, but you will have to wait to see that tomorrow!  We hope you all enjoy our movie of the Library Visit as much as we did in making the video!

Here is a link that I found on Google that gives some information on video and photography editing for iPod products.  I hope this is helpful in some way!!!!
http://brainz.org/20-best-iphone-photo-video-applications/