I used iMovie to create a story that covered highlights and contained first hand memories of Kansas history from my grandma , Anita Shipley, and my Great Aunt Doris Nappier.  It was hard to figure out how to structure the story.  I started with a “hooking” excerpt of my Great Great Grandfather’s obituary that told about his time as a farmer in Kansas and spoke to his character.  I then tied him to my more current family and gave the recollections that my grandmother and great aunt remember about The Dust Bowl and World War II.  When I approached both of them with the idea to include their stories, neither believed they had anything significant to say about their experiences in Kansas.  I begged to differ.  I was unfortunately unable to record them first hand as one live 5 hours away and the other lives in Arizona.  Instead, they both sent me memories and I recorded my voice telling their stories.  This project brought to light, for me, just how important it is that we be custodians of (family) history now.  As they have aged,

Layered audio and images

the less they can remember.  My mom collected extensive family history for both sides of my family years ago.  I was able to supplement what my grandma and great aunt could remember with the records my mom collected.  History experienced first hand always has the greater impact than reading it out of a book.  I hope to encourage my students one day to become digital witnesses of their family history.  In doing so, I hope history comes alive for them and they can connect with the content, the events, and the emotion of that time by speaking with their family members or people of an older generation.

As for using iMoive to create this project, half of it was intuitive, the other half was not.  I attempted to watch several tutorials on YouTube to help me.  The tutorials were either outdated or 45 minutes long.  By taking bits and pieces from the videos that I watched, I was able to complete the tasks I wanted to.  I was able to layer audio and images efficiently.  I

How I created the credits

struggled with creating credits.  A video that I watched, suggested that I use the text feature in several different frames.  I downloaded a black color image from google images and insert the text feature in the black frame to create my credits.  This was not my ideal solution but it worked.  I also used Skitch to label most of my photos so that viewers could visualize the people I speaking about in my video.

I hope you enjoy the stories of my family from small town Kansas and learning about their experiences while living in Kansas’ history.