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Part 3 | Making a Connected Learner: Make it choppy

25/08/2018 / claire.hazenberg / 4 Comments

Creating videos has always been a hobby of mine. End of every school year I would collate all the videos and photos I had taken and spend hours piecing them together with the best songs of the year to create a digital year book. I would burn the production onto CD’s and share them with my friends. In my final year of school I was given the job to create short videos to promote school events that would be shared on assemblies. As a result of the time constraints, for the first time I had to be cautious about the length of videos. “Only three minutes Claire.”

I quickly discovered the key to creating short and concise videos was in pre-production. Unlike my throw together videos I had to be prepared, knowing where scenes should be, who was going to say what and when and trying to troubleshoot problems before they happened. Philip, Juho & Rob (2014) support this idea stating that instructional videos with pre-production improves student engagement compared to videos with only post production.

Philip, Juho & Rob (2014) an empirical study of video production and student engagement in MOOC’s had several other handy finding and what I consider to be achievable and sensible recommendations. See Table 1.

Table 1. Summary of the main findings and video production recommendations.

Okay so I have my pre-production sorted thanks to The Plot and storyboarding and I have included over four different “talking head” scenes. But the length, that is an issue. This morning My KNA, an instructional video including screencasts, an animation and video was over 8 minutes long. Philip, Juho & Rob (2014) recommend less than 6 minutes so that is what I am aiming for.

Using the handy Speed tool I doubled the speed of the screencast, essentially chopping the screencast time in half.

All seemed fine until I realised the audio narration (recorded separately) was now twice as slow. I downloaded and installed Audacity with the intention of speeding up the narration to match the speed of the video. After highlighting the audio and selecting Effect > Change Speed I adjusted the speed to be 50% faster. It turned out like this.

I didn’t want to Google the answer straight away, so I persisted for another 10min trying every effect in the menu. I finally tried Effect > Change tempo which gave me the sped up result without the chipmunk voice. Winning!

This small but handy trick has shaved minutes off the overall video time, brining the production down to 5 minutes.

Thanks Audacity!

Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.

Part 2 | Making a Connected Learner: Screencasting

16/08/2018 / claire.hazenberg / 1 Comment

Recap: I am working on creating an instructional video about how to use Google+ Communities for teacher PLN’s. I have storyboarded the production using The Plot and am now starting to piece together the video, screencast and PowToon. I am also required to write an exegesis about my creation so I am on a strict timeline to get the project finished as I am a notoriously slow writer. Read more about the project here.

Today’s task is to film the introduction video using Photo Booth and record the first screencast using QuickTime Player screen recorder. I have used screen recording or screencasts before in flipped classroom settings and found the process to be somewhat stressful, especially when keeping to tight time frames. Students tend to loose interest when you spend too long typing or waiting for the page to load.

It has taken me seven attempts but I have finally recorded the first screencast demonstrating how to create a new community, add new members and edit community details. Using QuickTime Player was easy! Open the program > File > New Screen Recording. After pressing the record button, select the part of the screen you want to record and begin.

Now I will be honest, the reason I used QuickTime Player was because it was already installed on my computer. However there are several other programs that you can use that do the exact same thing such as Screencastify and Snagit. Check our Fractus Learning and their article 7 Of The Best Screencasting Software Tools For Classrooms for more ideas.

Finally here are my Top 5 tips for educators creating screencasts.

Clear your desktop. We don’t need to see the 38 files sitting on your desktop.
Delete browser history so it does not appear when you are typing in URL’s. Could be awkward.
Practice, practice, practice. Know where you need to move the mouse on the screen before recording. Time can be wasted moving around the screen unnecessarily.
Use a mouse when scrolling down pages.
Make sure you stick to your initial learning objective. Try not to go off on tangents. Stick to the script.

Need some more inspiration? This proffesor is a legend.

Part 1 | Making a Connected Learner: The Plot

10/08/2018 / claire.hazenberg / 0 Comments

“Under the direction of leadership at my school we are required to be active members of “Professional Learning Committees” or PLC’s. We have seven committees that cover topics such as numeracy, literacy, science, humanities, technology, community partnerships and student wellbeing. Each PLC is required to stay up to date with their relevant area, provide peer learning sessions and act as a “first port of call” for classroom teachers.

I propose to make an instructional video on the importance of accessing PLC’s online and how committee facilitators and members can use Google+ Communities as a platform for engaging and contributing to PLC’s.

I believe networking platforms such a Google+ Communities need to be used in conjunction with other tools so I would be creating this video as part of a three-part YouTube series that would cover other synchronous and asynchronous tools for networking such as Google Hangouts/Meets and Classroom.”

This is my proposal for my INF532 knowledge artfeact. Today I received tick of approval from my lecturer to proceed with the creation. I have four week to create an artefact that explores learning networks and ways to be a connected learner. In addition I will be writing an exegesis that uses research to justify my design choices as well as the using current literature to provide a theoretical background.

My next step now is to storyboard my video ready for production. I will be using The Plot an online storyboarding tool to map out the different tools I will be using, including Photobooth, PowToons, iMovie, Quicktime Screencast and Quicktime Voice recorder.

This is the storyboard so far.

I really like using Plot as a storyboarding tool. It’s a well designed and simple tool, allowing users to create and move scenes around a grid. In each scene you can choose to include an image, script and action details. My favourite feature so far is the text pane sidebar. It reminds me of Microsoft’s SmartArt feature where text can be entered either into the diagram or the text pane. I think this promotes fluidness and focuses on the narration and dialogue of the video.

I know from using PowToons before that the site suggests creating and narrating a script first before adding animations. In this regard, Plot and Powtoons go hand in hand and definitely recommend to anyone creating a PowToons to consider using Plot to plan the animation.

One feature that I have yet to use is the collaboration tool. If working in a team you can add team members to the storyboard so you can work collaboratively without even having to talk to them.

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Category: INF532 (page 3 of 6)

Part 3 | Making a Connected Learner: Make it choppy

Part 2 | Making a Connected Learner: Screencasting

Part 1 | Making a Connected Learner: The Plot

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