Why I was so grumpy yesterday afternoon...or what I learned from using WeVideo

I know chromebooks are our computing device of choice in the Pocatello School district, and so I want to share some of my suggestions and frustrations when working with the wevideo online video maker on a chromebook to complete our assignment.

First of all, I had to sign up for a 90 day trial.  And my final video has a pretty big watermark with the wevideo logo, stating that it was made as part of an educational trial.  I'm not sure how much it costs to upgrade or if the district has an account.

By far, the most frustrating part of the process was uploading my media from google drive.  On Wednesday my husband shared an album with me on Google Photos where he put several pictures I might want to use.  I added some of my own pictures to this album.  However, I couldn't access the album when trying to upload from the drive.  I could access and upload from Google Photos, but I couldn't search by album or date.  Luckily the ones my husband added to the shared album, were accesable because the photos were sorted by date added.  So those were at the top.  But the ones I added were not there and it was hard to scroll through my thousands of photos and find them.  What I did was open up Google Photos in a seperate tab, and download the photos onto the chromebook.  I also had some sucess by searching for the photos on my phone and then uploading them to Google Drive--not Photos.  

Another attempt to pre-organize my photos that backfired, was searching through and making a copy of my photos.  My iphone gave me the option of making a copy or making a duplicate.  Both of these seemed to put the photo at the front of my photo stream, so it was easily accesable.  And sometime I would choose "copy" and sometimes "duplicate.   But only one of these methods (I can't rember which one) caused photos to be re-dated when they automatically uploaded to Google Photos.

A final related frustration was the wifi in the classroom.  My phone was finiky and kept jumping off of wifi, and this meant my photos wouldn't automatically upload to Google Photos.

My final video was a bit tricky to share.  When first finishing the video, there were lots of options, but it was hard to figure out how to "get back" to those options.  They did send me an e-mail that I could click on to view the video, but I couldn't get the linke from the email.  I think I got it figured out, but it took a while.  In fact, here is the link: https://www.wevideo.com/view/939599370

All of this being said, once my files were uploaded it was easy to put together.  I have extremly little experience with this, and I was pleased with the program....I could figure it out with very little help.  I wish it was a little easier to do detailed trimming---perhaps by using the arrow keys.  

I also had success creating my voice over.  I just used my voice recorder on my iphone (i searched voice and something popped up.)  It was easy to upload and access on Google Drive.  Although it also looked super easy to use the chromebook microphone to make the voice over more directly.  The background music was also easy to find and use with lots of options to choose.

Overall, I think I would use this personally to create a hype video for a project or perhaps with my advisory class.  However, I don't know if I could justify using classtime for this...mostly because I have charge to help them become better writers...and I feel I should have kids share their ideas by writing papers.  But if I could get them to write a good narative, and have easily accesable (or created) media, it might work out.  I've just got to be able to have kids to do it with the extremely limited resource of time.