I had to download a video conversion software, as well as use Movie Maker to finish this project. It is rough, to say the least, but I have learne a lot in the process. Wanting to be good at this and that actually happening are two very different things. In a separate note, I had to take my daughter to the emergency room because we thought her foot was broken. On the way to the ER, we were rear-ended, so I put her on my back and gave her a piggy-back ride the rest of the way. It was just under a mile, but it was hot. The rest of the family stayed with the car to wait for the police. Things worked out fine, the car is drivable, the person who hit us took responsiblity and has insurance, and my daughter has a sprained ankle, rather than a break. With all of that said, my evening was eaten up by things and I feel pretty rushed to get all of this on here. I love technology and all of the things that it can do for us and our students in the classroom, but I am feeling like I am not a videographer.

This week's assignment is frustrating me... I have found some editing soft ware (Wax), and I have downloaded three video segments from a PBS site. I could not get them loaded from my computer into Wax, so I downloaded them from PBS in a different format. They still will not cooperate with downloading into the WAX software. I know that the problem is with me, not the computer or the software. It is just frustrating. I am going to a friend's house tonight to get some help with this so I can actually turn this thing in on time. Even though it is an ungraded video, I want to do well. This particular course in my master's is the one that intimidates me the most. I want to be good at this, but apparently I have a steep learning curve.

This week in my master's program, we had to create a personal video story. It was to be a maximum of three minutes long. It was an intimidating assignment for me. I had never done anything like this before, but I was aexcited about learning how to do it. I am also looking forward to finding ways to use this skill in the classroom. As I thought about this assignment, I had no idea what the subject of my video should be. I came up with a list of things, but I did not really get excited about any of them. I was getting worried, because I had to leave town for some family events. It was my grandmother's eightieth birthday, and the day after her party, our immediate family was going to the site of their old lake house to spread my grandfather's ashes. As we were cleaning up the party and making plans for the somber events of the following day, I finally realized that I knew what my personal video story should be about. I began to write my script, and spent time interviewing several family members on my grandfather. I got out many of my grandmother's old pictures of her husband, and used them to create a story board on her breakfast table. I worked with my family members to edit it and get their feedback. Then I made a trip to Kinko's in the middle of the night with my mother to scan in our old photographs, most of them sepia tone. I burned the scanned images onto a CD, then got a friend to help me learn the ins and outs of Story Maker 3. We found some great jazz cd's to use as the soundtrack, as that was my grandfather's favorite genre of music. This project that had started out being so intimidating became so personal for me. Even though this was not the medium that I would have first chosen for expression of my tribute to my grandfather, it turned out to be a very personal and fulfilling way to go about it.