I gave a presentation at the New Media Consortium conference back in June on a slew of web 2.0 video and slideshow tools I’ve been testing. The idea for the presentation began nearly a year ago when I was frustrated with the growing divide between the amount of foreign-language media available on the web and the number of teachers taking advantage of it. Initially, I thought the presentation would focus largely on JumpCut.com, a site that offers a fairly robust, web-based video editor. Users can upload video, audio, and images to their JumpCut accounts, then use the editor to create short movies.

One of the features that excited me about JumpCut was its ability to let users remix each other’s work. After watching any movie produced on JumpCut.com, users can click a remix button, which launches the video-editor interface and populates it with all of the video footage used in the movie. I thought this feature had great potential, and dreamed of assignments in which students would take a pool of raw footage, add their own material, do a little creative editing, and create spectacular mini-movies.

Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that there were several flaws in my plan. First, JumpCut doesn’t allow users to share audio, making it difficult to provide students with any sort of communal pool of voiceovers, sound effects, background music, etc. In addition, obtaining raw footage for students to manipulate was time consuming. I was able to download some great public domain video from the Internet Archive’s moving images database, but breaking these clips up into manageable chunks for use in JumpCut wasn’t easy. As an alternative, I experimented with capturing scenes from the game The Sims 2. The Sims proved an excellent visual resource for domestic drama and for reinforcing basic household vocabulary. As a result, I was able to work with Claudia Fernandez, a Spanish professor at DePaul, to create a sort of “video dictionary.” The goal of the project was to demonstrate everyday actions to help students master simple phrases in the past, present, and future tense.

As I started to push the limits of what could be captured in The Sims, I began exploring a variety of other tools that I thought might help faculty spice up their lectures and assignments with multimedia. I started my search in the hopes of finding a tool similar to JumpCut, but with the added ability to import video directly from YouTube and other video sharing sites. (Omnisio was the closest thing I could find, but it paled in comparison to JumpCut as a video-editing tool.)

My search quickly expanded beyond online video editing, and I found myself fiddling with subtitling tools like Overstream, slideshow presentation and annotation tools like VoiceThread, and multimedia-enhanced timeline generators like CircaVie. I quickly realized that I was going well beyond the original intent of my presentation, which was supposed to be a hands-on demonstration of JumpCut’s features. I decided to expand the focus of the presentation (even though it was too late to change the description in the conference agenda) and I offered attendees a comparison of nearly all the video and slideshow tools I had tried.

In the end, this approach seemed to go over very well with the audience. Several people thanked me for taking the time to do more than just recommend a long list of trendy tools I had never tried. I also got a lot of positive feedback on my example uses of the video editing and slideshow tools. Hopefully, by sharing them here, more people can benefit from what I’ve learned. Feel free to email me at dstanfo2@depaul.edu with any questions about the tools or my experience using them.