I don’t know if it’s just memory miss serving me or the
second time around went tremendously better than the first despite its slew of issues.
It really has surprised me how much fore planning it takes to run this class
and even then some things you just never thought about till it came up.
Below is a breakdown of the general happenings form that
session:
At 5:50 I showed up to prepare for the class, just to discover
that I had left my note book with the schedule and notes for class at my
apartment. I immediately scurried back to my apartment, grabbed the book and hurried
to class but by then I had already lost my prep time. It was 6:20 and only had
enough time to get set up and prep the attendance sheet. Talk about a bad
start...
Attendance went well, people were responsive and we only had
1 straggler.
Before breaking them off in to groups for think Pare Share, I
asked the class how many did their homework and a whopping 5 raised their hand...
I panicked a bit inside, 5 minutes in to class and we were already derailed. I
stalled for a minute deciding what to do next and had the 5 share their answers
to the questions with the class. I can’t say it went terribly, but it wasn’t good...
I had one student that was fine with blabbering a convoluted thought about what
she saw; however the other 4 were near imposable to get a peep out of.
Once that finished I began demonstrations, starting with the
audio effects demos. These went over ok for the most part, however I ran in to
a few bumps and stalls while going threw it (some things were in a different
location) most of this reared its head in my lost scramble threw the effects
trees looking for the one I wanted.
After that I bumbled over to the video position, crop, scale,
and rotate tools. This went over without a hitch and they seemed to really like
it.
The last point I went to was color correction/grading using
the color panel in FinalCut. To say the least, it was a disaster finding it... I
probably fumbled for 5 minutes looking for its obscure location... (I’m sorry but
aftereffects/PremearPro have better layouts) once it was discovered they got
the utility of the tool quickly and it seemed to like it.
After that I told the class to get started on their self-portrait
videos and they stalled, apparently none of them had read their assignment. (can’t
really knock them personally, I didn’t do that when I was in my intro classes)
which is what lead to my rediscovery of my inability to look at assignments (I
had noticed it prior but forgot about it), I managed to get one of the male
students to open it on Moodle that ways the assignment could be read aloud for
them. But the assignment left them with questions I could not easily answer in
my half asleep state. So I told them to work on their found footage for a bit
as I thought it threw. I had no demo materials so instead I gave them a few specifics
from the previous iteration of the assignment and assignments from this semester
on what to do.
I got the behind group going with a green screen and camera
along with the extra instruction they required. It was interesting how little
they seemed to know about using a digital camera, at least a SLR. (Well,
tripods even... it fell over twice.)
As class progressed students started to grab the camera and
green screen to get some new footage of themselves for usage in the portraits;
however there were a stubborn few that wanted to do it at home, leave early, or
not record any at all…
By about 9pm we had lost only 2 students, one of which
claimed to be done (she refused to expand on the portrait when it really needed
it) and the other had a really impressive set of found footage so I was easer
watching him leave.
At 9:30 a large chunk of the class had either completed
their work or was done with what they wanted to complete in class so I allowed
them to leave early. I stuck around till 10pm and there were some students that
were still working after I left.
over all I would say this session of solo teaching went
better than the one I did in the fall semester, however there was still lots of
space for improvement and some glaring oversights on my part with regards to
the notebook and Moodle aces capability’s.
