I decided to base my Rip.Mix.Feed activity around digital literacy applications that work (without a VPN) behind China’s Great Firewall (GFW). In our course literature, Stone (2007) posits that there are significant “dangers of government and employer surveillance and tracking, which have long marked literacy’s progress across the ages” (in Dobson & Willinsky, 2009; p. 21). Like Stone, I wholeheartedly agree that this censorship is a hindrance to progress. The Great Firewall has a daily impact on my teaching practice; my learners suffer most by missing out on some awesome, engaging digital learning activities. In addition, sometimes the simplest of tasks take much, much longer in China due to these restrictions.

 

To extend my learning for this assignment, I’ve been meaning to check out VideoScribe for over a year now. We’re currently using visual note taking (i.e. sketch noting) as a way to conceptualize our understandings on our current unit of inquiry on Sharing the Planet. I wanted to vet out this program further to see if it would be a great digital tool to add to the repertoire for my grade threes. Below, I’ll explain my process, how I dealt with areas I needed to troubleshoot and offer some of my final opinions on the software.

 

First, things I liked about VideoScribe were that the user interface (UI) was easy to use and that it implemented visual note-taking principles (i.e. sketch noting) as a presentation style. The stock photos that you could use to create your videos were also well curated and far above average in quality to that of their competitors in the slideware market segment. In addition, VideoScribe does let you trial a limited, yet functional version of their software before you’re asked to shell out your hard earned dollars seven days later (i.e. when the trial period ends).

 

Unfortunately, I found VideoScribe’s limitations to be plentiful; adding audio and video uploading were the two most frustrating and limiting in use of the trial software.

 

When you want to add audio to your video, you can only do so in a single track. Unfortunately, I found this out all too late as the UI makes it look like you can add audio slide by slide. To me, it makes sense to record audio in multiple segments, so it can get done correctly - I would have to do many takes to get all of it right in one shot. Think of how people authentically produce a movie in context - it’s done in segments, no? I thought, “No stress, I’ll record my audio and then combine it altogether or work out another solution.” Then, to further complicate matters, I recorded my audio clips using Quicktime, which only records in m4a; of course, VideoScribe only accepts .mp3. Looking for an easier conversion solution over Audacity, my inquiry found iTunes to be a simplified solution for getting the audio files over to mp3. From there, I knew I just had to adjust the length of the video clips in VideoScribe to accommodate the respective lengths of each sound clip.

 

Thinking that was the extent of my woes, I decided to upload my video. To give VideoScribe some credit, they give you plenty of options on how wish to upload and share your video with a pro (i.e. paid) account. As noted above, I needed the video in a saved file format in order to embed the audio in a movie editing software (e.g. iMovie). Of course, saving to file was not one of VideoScribe’s free options.

 

Feeling determined to win this battle, hilarity further ensued when I tried uploading the video from Videoscribe to Youtube (i.e. one of my few free options within VideoScribe). I figured I could just upload the video, then download the video via a Youtube downloading website like the one I use most often in China, en.savefrom.net, so I could get that hard disk file I longed for. Then, I could add the audio in my movie editing software. After waiting for the Videoscribe application to lethargically compress my video and then upload it to YouTube, the internet and VPN I had on (so I was able to access YouTube), decided to keep playing coy by telling me, “Sorry, your video has failed to upload to YouTube!” I tried again the next day, and with different VPN location servers, yet no success. Finally, I had a revelation that Quicktime’s screen recording would be able to do the job on getting me a saved disk copy of the video I created in Videoscribe. This had to be done a few times, since VideoScribe’s play times per slide are actually longer than noted in the software, so I had to re-adjust slides as best as possible for audio. The end result, which comes through in the video I shared, is audio that was not perfectly timed and I did notice that the cursor arrow did appear in my video.

 

To conclude, Videoscribe does afford you a flashy finished product. Perhaps the pro features are worth their weight in gold, but digital technology tools should make things easier and more efficient - at least by my definition. Like any new application with some buzz around it, I believe that it’s always worth giving it a go before making judgement. And what’s my verdict? Well, I’m assuming you know where I stand on that one :)