 And I'll be sharing with you how to make a green screen effect with your digital story. I will be using iMovie, but you can also do a green screen effect with Windows Movie Maker. You'll need a green wall, a story. You can create your illustrations either using the computer. My students use Google Draw, or you can have your students draw their illustrations and you can scan them. You can also use video. So if you are doing your digital story, you can add some video to the background of your narrator. You'll need a green screen. You can use a wall. I painted a part of my classroom wall green. Or you can use a green sheet, green cloth, anything that's green. Within Movie Maker or iMovie, you can select a green screen effect and it will remove the color green from your video. Make sure your person that's in front telling the story is not wearing green or a shade of blueish green. They'll become transparent. You'll want to make sure that you have a file on your computer, a folder. Save all your illustrations to one place so that you know where they're at. You'll import them if you're using an iMac or a MacBook or a Mac product. You can import your illustrations into iPhoto. If you're using Windows Movie Maker, I would save a folder to my desktop and place all of my illustrations in there. Have your students write out their story. You can use a story board to help them. Then have them practice with a friend telling their story. It is best that your students tell their story and not read their story. Have them memorize it or have cue cards to help them when they are up in front of the green screen recording. The more practice they have, the better their story is going to look. Once you're ready and your students are ready to record their story in front of their green screen, I would suggest I use my iPad. You can use a flip camera, whatever video recording device that you have, but put it on a tripod. There are mounts for iPads that attach to tripods. This will just keep your camera still. Have a person behind the camera so that your student is looking at them as they're telling their story and their eyes aren't jetting around the room. It also makes them feel more at ease when recording. Once you're ready to put your story together, your student has recorded in front of their green screen, you are going to import the video onto the computer that is holding your illustrations or video depending on what kind of effect you are wanting for your digital story. In iMovie, you'll want to have the advanced tool showing in order to do the green screen effect. You'll need to click on the words iMovie, choose preference, and then choose show advanced tools. Make sure there's a check mark in that box. Once you have that, you can close that Windows option and then you can start dragging and dropping your illustrations onto your video. When you're building your green screen video, you'll want to put your still pictures or your illustrations or your video on the bottom. You'll drag and drop them. So for example, I would like to take this video clip. This will be my bottom. And then you are going to overlay your green screen video. You select what you want. You drag it and you're going to drop it right on top of your video. You can see I am on top and I have a green circle with a plus sign. When I let go of my mouse, I'm going to get options. And I'm going to say I want to green screen this. When that happens, you'll see that the video that was shot in front of the green screen is now on top of the video that I recorded from my computer. The options will appear and you'll want to do green screen effect. You'll want to click on that green screen effect. And once you do that, then your video of your person is in front and the illustrations will be behind them. You can do some adjustments with the videos and with the pictures. You can crop them. You can do a cans burn effect depending on what effect you want for your video and your digital story. The best way to learn how to do the green screen effect and I maybe it's just to play around with it. You cannot break this program. Play around, see what works for you. See what you like things. Click on options. Play with the timing. Play with the sound adjustment. When I do recording, I do go into my video. I click on the little arrow down at the bottom and I can go into audio options and I like to increase the volume of my video. I've learned that if I don't do that, some people say they can't hear the person talking or telling the story. If you are doing a video behind the person talking, you may want to mute the sound. That would be in the audio adjustment. You just click on the video that you dropped on top of the green screen and choose the audio and turn down the sound. You can completely remove the sound. If you are wanting a Superman effect and your person is up in the clouds, you would definitely want to remove the sound from the background video. In iMovie, you'll want to click on events and then you can click import the video. You can do it from the iPad itself or you can do it from iPhoto. Once you have your video in iMovie, you're going to want to start developing and putting your story together. You're going to want a title slide. There are several options for text in iMovie and also in Windows Maker. I would put the title and the name of the person creating the story. Once you have laid out your background images on the storyboard, it could be an image or a video. It is now time to overlay what you recorded in front of the green screen. You'll simply drag and drop what you recorded in front of the green screen on top of your background images. When you do this, you'll get a menu and you'll select green screen. Once you have selected the green screen effect, you'll see that your video that you recorded in front of the green screen is now on top of your background images. You may have to adjust your timing, your audio, or your crop adjustments to fit your story and your needs. You can do this in the menu selection. Click on the arrow at the bottom corner, left-hand corner, either on your background images or your green screen video. Some tips when doing the recording for the green screen. Make sure you're recording in a quiet room. Have plenty of lights. The more lights, the better your effect will be. You won't look transparent. I use a desk lamp, and I set it on the floor to shine up light behind the person telling the story. I also put a desk lamp kind of off to the side so it's shining on the person. I have all the lights in my room on. Plenty of lights helps keep the person that's doing the recording not so transparent and ghost-like. Another tip is to record in a very quiet room. Make signs up. When you're recording, shut your door and make it quiet as possible. There will be the occasional announcement. Just pause your video and record it again. Another tip is to back up the original video. Keep it in a different place on a flash drive, on an external hard drive, somewhere else on the computer. In case your student accidentally deletes that file when playing around in iMovie, you don't lose the original video and you don't have to record it again. Also save your illustrations. Back them up. You can google draw. It's already backed up online. They just have to download it again. If you use other programs such as paint or sketch, I would just make sure you have an additional copy just in case something gets deleted. Things happen. When all your videos are done, it's fun to have a viewing party. Project the videos up on your whiteboard or with your projector so that the kids enjoy and share their stories. You can also share the links to where the stories are to parents. Parents love to see the work that their students are doing. If you have a classroom website, you can also put the stories on there. Or if you're an MOTO, you can embed the stories in there. Depending on what tools that you're using, share. Kids love to show off what they do. To export your iMovie, once you're done, you want to share it. So you'll need to go up to your menu bar. Click share. And there's many choices that you can do to share your movie. You can choose YouTube or you can export it. I like to export to my computer. Once you choose which option you want to export it, I usually do the large so it can be viewed on the iPhone, iPad, Apple, TV, computer. Name your movie, pick the location you want it to go, and export it.