Steven Spielberg, Dropbox and Me

Both of my posts this week conform to the "down in the trenches" theme of this blog. While I am not slogging it out in the classroom this summer, I am trying to develop actual solutions for real classes, using available technologies. No pontificating guru, I.

Recently I added to my collection of resources for my film class. I've described this process before: I write a script or outline and lay down a soundtrack with GarageBand. I then select jpegs and drop them and the soundtrack into PhotoToMovie. It took about five hours to synch the photos with the sound in the following ten minute movie :



This Speilberg movie has two new elements. Most of the Minority Report stills were captured with Voila. And I completed my work across two computers, using Dropbox. Dropbox is free. As described on its home page, this is what it does:

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they'll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you've installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!). Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device.

I have already added the link for my Spielberg movie to Moodle. My students will be required to listen to it. I hope you will sample a couple of minutes, voluntarily!