How to introduce Final Cut Pro X to children in less than an hour
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
On Sunday I was lucky enough to catch the live stream of episode 47 of the Tech Educator podcast.
The Tech Educator Podcast supports teachers who want to use and teach technology in schools.
Sunday's show was their first on Final Cut Pro X. The main guest was Jon Corippo - an Apple Distinguished Educator who has devised a lesson plan that he uses to introduce Final Cut Pro X to a classroom of children in less than an hour.
He's summarised the lesson in a 30 slide presentation that he's made available for anyone to use to teach students of any age:
Although you can download the presentation and brief notes from its page on Slideshare I also suggest you watch and listen Jon's quick runthrough as part of the Tech Educator podcast:
He starts soon after 17 minutes and 25 seconds.
After his presentation runthough Jon switches to Final Cut Pro X and demonstrates elements of the lesson in the app itself and then goes on to introduce more features, sometimes in response to presenter and listener questions.
The interesting thing about Jon's lesson is that he teaches fun features as quickly as possible. He doesn't come up with a complex scenario about the film his students are about to make. He shows how to import footage, create a new project, add edits to a clip, add effects, transitions and titles, and then export the result. Enough to get students to the stage where they can find much of the rest of the tools they need to edit - because they want to know more.
Although this lesson method could be used to teach iMovie, why not teach the more powerful application? Although it is more expensive, Apple offers deals for multiple copies of Final Cut, and the software licence allows for each copy to be installed on five machines.
When teacher friends who have taught editing and film making using Final Cut Pro 7 ask me which application they should teach now, I suggest that Adobe Premiere Pro is used on many setups in the real world of production, but Final Cut Pro X is a better tool to learn how to edit. For educators it is hard to seperate the teaching of the skill from the teaching of the tool - the difference between creative writing and computer-based word processing.
For more Final Cut Pro X and other technology education tips, take a look at Jeffrey Bradbury's TeacherCast videos on YouTube.