Community reviews for iMovie

iMovie can be great teaching tool. You could use it to have students tell a story, re-create a scene from a book, make an advanced slideshow (more advanced than iPhotos slideshow), create a documentary, set up interviews, recap field trips, highlight themselves as an "About Me" project, or even set up a vocabulary visual display with words and music!

Students are always engaged when in the midst of creating 'something' - for others to view. The app is easy to use, allows for basic editing, titles and some sound. I found the voice over to be a little clunky for the younger students to use, but overall kids were able to create movies to entertain, teach and inform a school wide audience about varied subjects. There is some teacher involvement as I collected all the movies to my computer and burned DVD's for kids to take home.

I will admit that my use of iMovie is not a "time saver" initially. It takes some effort on my part to create the training videos. However, now that I've been using it for a few years, I find myself needing to create fewer videos. This frees up some time to focus on my students. The other time consideration is the time you will need to train students to use iMovie. This is minimal - maybe a 10-15 minutes on the interface and they will figure it out from there. Once these initial time investments are made, you will really appreciate the level of creativity and enthusiasm for learning that you receive from your students! PS, iMovie is now FREE in the iOS store.

I highly recommend this app because of the ease of use. While it is no Final Cut or Adobe Premier Pro, it is a good easy to use tool that students can master within a few uses. One of the best features is the "Trailer" project, which gives the user a variety of templates to create a trailer for a movie, book, game, etc. My students have always enjoyed making these trailers, many times they are just creations of their own imaginations, but we have focused there use in projects. One of my complaints come from the change when the app became free and completely resigned, it feels a bit more stripped down and somewhat harder to work with the smaller nuances of your projects. Yet, with each update they continue to bring the app back to it's former glory! Overall, I recommend this app to all teachers using iPads in their classroom.

iMovie makes it easy to take all of your multimedia content for a lesson and integrate it into a professional looking movie. One of the coolest features is the movie trailer template. I use this in my class at the beginning of a lesson to generate interest and excitement on a given topic.