This is going to be a running theme with this blog — I have never considered myself very technically proficient. I never had any real reason to be.

My undergraduate and graduate programs were both academic, research-oriented programs in which I was expected, primarily, to communicate in particular types of writing. There were rarely any opportunities or need for me to learn how to communicate in different modes, including visual ones.

I gained a bit of experience incorporating the visual into narratives when I worked at Centropa, a Jewish historical institute with an archive of 1200 interviews and 20,000+ photos. I worked a bit on a museum exhibit and contributed to the design of a multimedia performance piece adapted from one of our source books. However, my involvement with creating visual narrative was limited; I was largely responsible for, still, crafting written narrative and, at most, making that connect with the visual or choosing written text for others to translate to visual text.

You can imagine how terrified I may have been, then, when two weeks into the semester in the secondary education program I was expected to complete, for grading, an edited, multimedia video. “Yeah hecking right, I can’t do that,” I thought to myself.

“Worry Drawer” by The Opus is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Necessity and ed tech professors, however, are great teachers. They can turn “Yeah hecking right, I can’t do that” to “Right! Heck Yeah! I can do that!” pretty quickly. I put my worries in the worry drawer and set myself to do a scary thing: learn something I previously felt incapable of learning.

 

With the help of an iMovie workshop and the support (and commiseration) of my new colleagues, I successfully created and edited some videos. I am particularly proud of this gem I made in the iMovie workshop:

 

This is clearly done by an extreme amateur, but I couldn’t care less — I was, am, very proud of myself for having done it at all. I am very proud of myself, and happy about, for embracing the opportunity to learn a new skill that I thought I would be a total failure at. This newfound sense of confidence, even in my poorly paced lil video of my dog, made it so that I even enjoyed the process of making the actual video assignment.

This forced me to start to think of myself who isn’t just an effective written communicator, but someone who is — or at least can be, an effective visual communicator, and I think that actively, confidently embracing the opportunity to develop that communication skill will serve me well as an educator. It will serve me in my specific subject purposes — I will, for instance, be able to take narratives that I would normally express verbally or in writing in history classes and express them visually.

More importantly, learning how to express myself and my  narratives visually will provide me a better understanding of visual narratives that students will present to me and provide me with more understanding of what my students will actually have to do and go through to present me with their work. Learning how to use iMovie was just one of many steps of the process of creating the video I submitted for my assignment. The others included learning how to use video screen capturing software and downloading the files:

 

 

finding and selecting images that would work together to communicate a particular narrative (in my own images, open source images, etc.), editing some of those images, like this one:

Photo by Alysha Zawaduk

And so on, and so on.

Overall, I was able to take a concept or form that I am familiar with — narrative — and connect it and apply it to a different medium than I am used to working with. I don’t think my students will mind my sub-par video editing skills. And if they do, I don’t care — they’re more than I thought I would have.