I used Camtasia to add captions to a new portion of my video project. I got frustrated trying to manipulate the various parameters to make it fit within my personal aesthetics, so I just gave in to the default settings and called it a day. Creating the captions was very easy and did not require much time at all. I saved the completed file as an AVI and uploaded it to my video blog, where you can view it.

While most of the digital stories on the website could in some ways be helped by adding captions (except for one which relied almost entirely on visuals and was interesting in that regard), I was particularly drawn to the Engines of our Ingenuity stories. As I listen to Dr. Leinhard on NPR regularly and even once attended a book signing to pick up a copy of his latest book for my father, a now-retired engineer who graduated from the University of Houston in the early 1970s, I was already intrigued by the way in which Leinhard could connect knowledge from so many disciplines to, in fact, describe how things work.

I saw the Macbeth clip and thought back to my year as an English teacher. (I taught English briefly for one year as part of an alternative certification program before deciding to pursue my master’s degree in education.) One of the last pieces of literature I taught was that of Macbeth. My students (all seniors) were less than thrilled to begin another piece of literature that they had difficulty reading, particularly when they were within weeks of graduating from high school. Still, the power of the story itself was enough to draw many of them in, provided that we discussed in detail what was happening and connected the material to real-world events. My students began to research tragic heroes of the world, ranging from Che Guevara to Idi Amin to Princess Diana and compare their stories to those of Macbeth, while learning to paraphrase direct quotes from Shakespeare so that the power of his words weren’t lost in translation.

I could imagine using Leinhard’s Macbeth video in a class such as this. To be honest, many of my students were reading on a level below that of twelfth grade English, some at perhaps a fourth or fifth grade level. It was like pulling teeth at times to teach sonnets (required by my particular school) to English language learners who could not understand why the words were so mixed up in iambic pentameter. One student said that it took her nearly six hours to paraphrase a single sonnet. She may have been exaggerating, but she and many others struggled mightily with the language. Still, simply having the words to a narration, particularly of someone connecting a personal story and experience to Macbeth or any other work of literature, helped tremendously.

In literacy courses, professors emphasize repeating words in as many modes as possible. With my SAT preparation class, we would routinely act out “vocabulary charades,” make up songs and pneumonic devices, and post drawings of our words around the room. While some students (such as the children my sisters-in-law teach who cannot hear without cochlear implants) absolutely need captions, even those who are first learning to read, who are still learning to speak and write in English, or who struggle with functional literacy even as high school seniors can benefit from having printed words accompany a voiceover on an educational video.

If I had the opportunity to do that year over again, I would have made many changes to my teaching style, and one important change would have been to include more educationally significant videos with captions (instead of merely showing the movie at the end of the unit as worn-out teachers are apt to do) and assign a video project in place of a final paper (which would have made me quite a popular teacher as the kids were sick of writing by the end of the year).

Though my students might not have been able to read Shakespeare as fluently as I would have liked, they certainly were able to understand the concepts of Shakespeare and to think at a high level. Captions would have reinforced the ideas expressed in the video in addition to the direct quotes from Shakespeare and would have helped them to remember the higher level language connected with the ideas.

I was able to use my previously created video with narration and then added captions. 

Using Sony Vegas, captions are quite easy. The most difficult part was that, like with Photoshop or Imageready, Vegas works in layers with several video layers available and my captions did not show up until I figured out they needed to be on the top layer in order to overlay the video images. Once I figured it out, its a simple drag and drop to position the captions higher in the sequence. 

Captions are easy to create, modify and position, and you can even use effects such as rotating. (I have not yet figured out how to scroll.) 

The more I use the Vegas program, the easier it appears to be to use and the more comfortable I am with it. And unlike Premiere, it always works.