Jonas Salk Middle School Career Day

A presentation about information technology with demonstrations.

I volunteered to create a presentation for career day at school. Actually, my daughter asked me and I said “okay”. Then career day presentations were changed from in person to online because of corona virus.

It would have been so much easier for me to do in person. I’m certain the total time spent would be less than what I needed to produce the video! Everything I wanted to present could have been done live. Timing would be easier and adjustments could be made in each session depending the interest of the previous audience and questions during the presentation.

That wasn’t to be.

The good thing about the video is I was able to produce it. The bad things are obvious in review. There are several parts where the dialog is disjointed and not flowing with events on the screen. Arrangement of some screen elements blocks others in an undesirable way. And I need to think more of the audience. This is likely much better for high school seniors than eighth graders. Work more on the script and be EXPRESSIVE!

Making this video was an enjoyable and challenging experience. I had to learn things I’d never known to make the video. And watching myself and the content I can see how it could easily be improved. Information I’ll tuck away to use if and when there’s a next time.

If you’d like to check out the video, here it is.

At the end of the video is a list of the software used to produce it. That same list, with working links, is below.

Ubuntu 18.08 runs the laptop used to create this video (it’s an alternative to Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS). https://ubuntu.com/

OpenShot video editor was used to create the video. https://www.openshot.org/

vokoscreen made the screen video captures that got edited in OpenShot. https://linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen/vokoscreen.html

GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, was used to create or edit some of the images in the video and to obscure and alter some portions of the video images. https://www.gimp.org/

Cheese was used to record my head shot and voice.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Cheese

Pick and OpenShot’s chroma key effect were used make the background behind my head transparent rather than appear in a box that blocked the background. https://www.kryogenix.org/code/pick/

I used LibreOffice Writer to take notes and make plans as I developed the video and for the scripts I used to guide narration. LibreOffice Calc helped calculating how to adjust length of some clips to fit the target time. https://www.libreoffice.org/