(4) Technical skills: Video-making tools and skills

Anna Xia Yang, Year 3 Student of BEd(EL) (2019/20)

With the emergence of some affordable and user-friendly video-making software, the production of digital stories becomes more practical and achievable pre-service teachers like us. In this QEF project, we have used three common software to produce our digital stories for primary school students. 

The first one is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is mainly used in our pre-production stage. In this stage, the PPT slides to be played in the digital stories are created based on the content of the storybooks we have picked. To better facilitate students’ understanding of the stories, more pictures are included in the PPT slides with different animations to enrich the illustrations of the original storybooks so that students can easily process the stories as they see the vivid animated pictures in the digital stories. 

The second one is Windows’ video editing tool Photos. It is mainly adopted in our post-production stage in which more complex animations are added into the digital stories. With the help of the 3D animation resources in Photos, we can include more visual effects such as change of weather into our digital stories to enhance students’ viewing experience or provide visual guidance to help students focus their attention on specific plots of the stories. In addition, Photos also allows us to add music into our digital stories so that we can help students better perceive the moods of the stories via different music. 

The last one is ArcTime which is another software used in post-production stage. This software can help us create subtitles for our digital stories, so there are two different ways to present the stories in our digital stories. The first one is voice-over, while the other one is with subtitles. Therefore, even if some students with lower ability do not have adequate listening skills to catch up with the voice-over, they can still follow the stories by reading the subtitles. With a combination of different video-making software introduced above, we not only intend to produce high-quality interesting digital stories for students but also make them engaged more in reading and further motivate them to read and learn more.

Anna Xia

Three Video-making tools