Editing Videos and Learning ASL

As was the task for this week, I searched everywhere for how I wanted to document my learning this week and tried way too many apps before finally settling on a video editing app. Video editing is not something I am familiar with at all other than the random times I edit videos of my dogs for TikTok (usually amounts to putting a filter on it).

The video editor I chose is called "Splice - Video Editor and Maker" which had the offer for a 7 day free trial so I went ahead with that to see if I thought it was worth it.

My goal for this video was to show some of the conversational ASL that I have been learning, without actually recording an actual conversation. As I am not very skilled/knowledgeable in video editing, I kept it pretty basic but this app made it very easy to do what I did!

First, I went through and added all of my videos which I recorded beforehand in the order that I wanted them to appear. I found out this was not necessary as you can easily hold and drag a clip to change its place in the video (as you can see me do below).

One thing I have found tricky with learning ASL is talking and signing at the same time, which I think is partially due to the fact that I haven't been able to converse with anyone yet and also partially due to the fact that I am focusing very hard on what my hands are doing. With that being the case in all my video clips I wanted to make sure to include the text as I sign so people who don't know sign language can follow along. The text was very easy to include and had a few different options, like closed captions (automated), text animations, and manual text (shown below). I used manual text since I wasn't actually speaking and was able to include different text for different parts of the video (green sections in photo below). What I found worked best in this instance was to only include short pieces of text and line them up so they followed my hand motions. If you use longer pieces of text, it can be hard to follow and it takes up more space on the screen so you can't visually see as much of what is happening in the video.

The last piece was to add sound to the video. With the Pro version, you are able to add your own sound from Apple Music (which seemed to really be the only difference between pro and free). I chose not to do this as I didn't want to distract from the text on the video with the words in the music, so I just chose a sound available on the app.

Overall, I really liked this app and I think it would be super useful for people who may be wanting to get into video editing. I also think this could be a really cool tool for the classroom. I love doing final projects and allowing students to choose how they would like to present the information that they have learned, so I definitely think this could be an asset in a project like that. Using this app in the classroom as I have described would fit in the "augmentation" section of the SAMR model, as you could just use videos for the students to present information, but this tool allows for more features to be included, like voiceover, closed captioning, etc.