....something I realized a little too late into the game my first year of teaching was that smartphones and Google Drive have totally changed the way adolescents understand managing their computers.
What comes second nature to me (and blind-sided me in class) because I toted USBs in secondary school is just not a Thing anymore. Kids keep their files in the cloud! Pictures, documents, it’s all on Google Drive or Photos. You don’t have to care about knowing where you put something, because it’s searchable immediately. We don’t use USB sticks or flash drives, everything is in the ether and portable all on its own. No exoskeletons needed.
This is fine for most standard classes, and even most Photoshop projects, but when it comes to film, lack of good file storage flat out kills projects. Modern video software still requires the user to keep their files on the local harddrive in a consistent location. Why? Because raw movie files are huge and playback/editing would take twice as long if the computer needed to pull from farther away! USB and Cloud Downloads for most people are still really, really slow.
Final Cut Pro X and iMovie both sort your files for you. When importing a movie, it has you title the project and squirrels away your footage into its own directory, freeing the user from any headaches. This causes some stress down the line if you ever want to work on the same project from a different computer. They can be so hard to find. Final Cut works around this with a ‘packaging’ button that will regroup everything for you should you need it.
Adobe Premiere lets you set your own directory locations, but therein lies the hangup for my students. They just don’t understand that files need to be in the same place as the .pproj file they are saving and creating. With all of the other programs they use (Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut X) the data has always been self-contained. If you send a file, for the most part, it is viewable on whatever it’s being sent to. (modern versions of iMovie and Final Cut both lack an ‘export’ button, it’s a ‘share’ button, so they even have trouble grasping that the file has to be cooked together before it’s viewable on grandma’s VCR or whatever.) They live a drag-and-drop lifestyle and can be sloppy about where the stuff is in the computer. It’s never had to be in one place before.
Unfortunately, if it wasn’t in one place, other kids using the computers could inadvertently move stuff or delete everything from downloads, etc....so many projects had met their maker before completion in my lab. Worse, frequently they would email me the .pproj file as a final project submission, not getting that I couldn’t watch it without all the supporting footage in the same folder! Kids Do Not Get the sanctity of keeping digital stuff in one consistent place. Because it’s not tangible! If it were a physical filing cabinet they would do so much better.
To get around this, on day one I now have them set up a folder with their name on it in documents, and subsequent internal folders for the projects we will do. Step two is to remind them to double-check the directory each time they set up a new project file, and to make sure they’re transporting stuff off of SD cards truly onto and into their harddrive files. They’re getting it now! It’s just so new to them!
