Screencasts give you space to breathe at a conference

I gained an insight recently into a new benefit that we might all derive from screencasts. I gave a paper about the role of a placement tutor and, in particular, how the skills we develop as personal tutors have to be adapted to suit the role of placement tutor. I did not know anyone at the conference, and I was given the dreaded after lunch slot, so I knew I would need to keep everyone interested, or at least awake!

With these considerations in mind, I chose to show the audience, after some initial preamble, an animated screencast that I have made for my students, showing them how our academic placement scheme in English Literature works. (The screencast is in the GRASS screencast bank on this site.)

Screenshot academic placement screencast

What happened next was rather unexpected. During the few minutes of the screencast I saw shoulders relax. Some people smiled. A couple even laughed at some humorous animation on one of the slides. Nobody – nobody at all – looked at me. It was a delight. I could get my bearings whilst they watched, which helped me, but I also realised that this was really helping them. Better than any description I could have given them, this short screencast gave them the student’s eye view on how our placement system works. I felt confident that they knew exactly what I was talking about from then on, and also that they had a sense of how a student might feel during the early part of the journey towards a successful academic placement.

I have used Prezi and PowerPoint at conferences before, and sometime I have just talked to people without a visual aid, but this new experiment has inspired me to use screencasts in this setting in future.

What was perhaps most surprising was the way the audience members reacted during the Q &A session. They did ask me about being a placement tutor, of course, but I also answered several interesting questions about making screencasts and how I felt students might benefit from them. It seems that the appetite for screencasts as a pedagogical tool continues to increase – interesting times lie ahead!

Enhancement through screencasts…continued…

Following on from my last blog post,  I did manage to produce a couple of screencasts ready for Enhancement Week. I asked colleagues to send me the material and then I made the screencasts, although I hope in future to encourage more staff to produce them themselves. We now have the first of ten screencasts completed.

A couple of things happened to me as I worked on this project that it might be worth noting:

1. Colleagues are able to see the screencasts on our bb site already, so they are getting better at knowing how much material sits well in this context.

2. I have stuck to the idea of using Powtoon for everything that is extra-curricula and will continue with Prezi for all else, for now.

3. I have used the same music in each of my Powtoon screencasts. This was partly because a student came to my office yesterday and told me that, although the music is beginning to annoy him, it does make him perk up and know that he has to take notice!

4. The mash up function on bb that I have been getting so excited about does not seem to work until YouTube has indexed the screencasts, so after 48 hours of waiting I went back to the ’embed media’ function, which I know has limitations in terms of useability by all.

5. I also realised that, to find anything on YouTube so as to use the mash up function, you do need a reasonably exclusive title. ‘Study Abroad’, one of my original titles, brought up pages and pages of possibilities.

You can see the screencasts here:

Enhancement personal tutor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKxKZzNZKkc

 

Enhancement study abroad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3x7SESgt5s

 

Mashups? I love them!

I have just found the ‘mashups’ function on Blackboard. Who knew that even existed??! I have struggled in the past trying to ensure reliability on all devices when inserting screencasts into content areas of bb, and even when I managed to insert them, they often seemed to fall over just at the point when they were most needed.

A chance browse showed me the mashups function and now I have been able to link to all the screencasts I have on YouTube with no problem at all. The function is easy and quick to use and it looks neat and professional on the page. I have been able to include them on a general information page for all English Literature students and I have emailed the students and my colleagues to tell them they are there. I have also asked them to let me know if they would like to see any other topics covered. It will be interesting to see what happens next…

bb screenshot

Moments of clarity

Using technology is a funny thing. At one moment you feel elated because it has done exactly what you wanted. The next, you are left wondering how on earth you can have been so stupid. Take powtoon (http://www.powtoon.com) animated screencasts as an example. I had produced nearly a dozen of them before I decided to fix a little thing that had been niggling at me all along. When I went to these screencasts, or displayed them for others, the screen they saw (the screenshot displayed before pressing ‘play’) was a bit of a muddle, sometimes having a few words of text on it and sometimes an animated figure mid-move. I knew I had done something wrong, and set out to discover my error.

Screenshot academic placement screencast

When I went back to powtoons I had that moment of clarity that so often arrives in these situations. It was a quick enough process to work out that whatever was on the editing screen at the moment when I pressed play was the image that would appear forever as the opening screen. It was rather more laborious to fix it. I decided that I wanted an image of a character on each of my screencast screenshots, and so I fiddled about for ages, altering the timing slightly to ensure that each powtoon would display a character at the side of the screen before pressing ‘play’.

I republished each and every one of them and was rather proud of myself for at least five minutes. I decided to leave them publishing whilst I made myself a cup of tea. As I waited for the kettle to boil I realised my stupidity: why just a figure on the screen? Why on earth had I not had the sense to begin each powtoon with a proper title screen? That way, anyone could see that they were about to view the correct animation before they began.

So, a lesson learned. Am I going to make sure that, in future, each of my powtoons has a title screen prior to publication? Of course. Am I going to go back and change all of those powtoons I have just republished? It’s Week Three of a busy term – what do you reckon?!

I love powtoons too!

After Emma’s brilliant start on powtoons I have decided to follow suit! I thought it would be really difficult, I suppose because the end result looks so good, but in fact it was just as intuitive as she had promised me it would be. In fact, I am noticing that I am getting a bit better at working my way around this type of software the more I use it, which might be an encouraging thought for any colleagues thinking of dipping their toes in.

The one thing I found it hard to get my head around at first was the timing. Because each element on the screen can move on and off in different ways, and you can dictate how long an element stays on the screen, and you have to work a bit at getting it right. At first I had characters zooming in and flying out all over the place and I realised, to my horror, that when I played the ‘show’ back, slides were moving on before all of the words had appeared.

The good news is that there is a really useful little tour guide (at the top right of the screen as you are working on a powtoon, just click on ‘tour’) – the bad news is that I still couldn’t work out, for a little while, how to change the timing. (You have to click on the element – text or image – that you want to control and then you can use the timing slide bar to expand or contract their time on screen. The overall timing of each slide is changeable regardless of where you have clicked – you use + and – on the time bar.)

The two I have created so far are here:

Screenshot careers learning screencast

 

Screenshot academic placement screencast

 

Now I have a decision to make. Do I use animation to offer help and advice for topics outside the core curriculum, and still use Prezi screencasts for things like module descriptions, or should I mix it all up? I can see benefits to students being able to see from the form of the screencast whether they are looking at an ‘extra’ or something relating to core activity, but I am a little bit in love with powtoons now…

I think I will await the results of Emma’s survey to student (see her last post) and then decide.

Flat Prezis…deep Prezis …still deciding…

An unexpected question has come up this week and I am still pondering it…

Our Part One module convenors are all doing a great job of producing Prezis for our modules descriptions, which we will turn into screencasts. I hope that they will also be voiced by the convenors so that it is not just my voice on every screencast. All well and good, you might think, until we all got together.

One thing became clear as soon as we started to talk about the screencasts – each person was very attached to the Prezi template they had chosen, but they were very different from each other. This is not a huge problem, but it did lead to discussions about how standardised these things should be. Should a department (and/or school) ensure that all of the screencasts issued for a certain purpose (say, module descriptions) are based on the same Prezi/PowerPoint template?

Prezi wikimedia image

Emma and I had already had a similar discussion, considering whether animated screencasts and Prezi-based screencasts would sit comfortably together in a group of related screencasts, so I should have expected that this discussion would arise with my department colleagues.

For now, we have agreed to create all of the draft Prezis (seven of them) and then compare. Given that Prezi will allow for different colour themes in one template, it would be possible for us to choose one template for all of them, or leave them as they are.

The second question that emerged was about how ‘deep’ the Prezi template should be. Should it comprise a series of connecting sections which sit flat in front of a background, or should the sections draw the viewer through an experience, such as along a road or into a building, or up mountain? I had no idea that colleagues would have such vivid ideas about this, but they do. We talked about whether we wanted our module descriptions to look like a journey with a goal at the end – on a Part One module? Isn’t that meant to be the start of a journey? Also, would it make the process of choosing a module look laborious if they wandered through a labyrinthine screencast to get an overview?

 

prezi-bubble-free

‘Flat’ style Prezi – easier to take an overview? Not interesting enough?

 

 prezi-templates-free

‘Deep’ style Prezi – more interesting and appealing? Too complicated?

 

I realise that we are academics and so can have a tendency to overthink everything we do, but I take heart from this experience. Who could have predicted that we would all come to care so much about screencasts?!

 

Could screencasts help our new students learn to be team players?

Being asked to think of a team-building exercise to run with my new personal tutees in Welcome Week got me thinking about the best way to do this. So, naturally, my thoughts turned to screencasts! I have come up with an idea which I think should work…

I am going to produce a series of screencasts about topics relevant to our new students (in my case, English Literature, being a student, living in Reading…that sort of thing…) and each of these will contain one or two lies. (For any of you who listen to ‘The Unbelievable Truth’ on Radio 4 or who watch ‘Would I Lie to You?’ on TV, this will be starting to sound familiar…).

Wouldilietoyou

I am hoping to join up with a few colleagues for this, so that we have some decent-sized groups of tutees. The new students will watch the screencasts and then will work as a group to identify the lies. I am hoping that five screencasts will suffice for an hour of activity.

I will be giving out a prize to the winning team and I hope they will also have had fun and got to know their new university peers.

first_prize_ribbon

What I am not sure about yet is whether to divide them into their personal tutor groups, so that each set of personal tutees can bond as a group. I also can’t quite decide whether to lodge the screencasts on our YouTube channel so that they (and the world) can look at them in advance. I think the element of surprise is probably best, but I am going to give it some more thought.

One of the pleasures of a group project like GRASS is the way that we can help each other and share ideas. When I took this plan to Emma she immediately decided that she could do something similar, but rather than using screencasts based on Prezis or animation, she is going to ask her colleagues to film themselves reciting a script which contains some lies.

unbelievable_truth_book

This would have a huge advantage in that the students would see some of their lecturers on film before they meet them in person, so I think it is an improvement. I was planning to ask the personal tutors to recite from a screen showing the screencasts, which has the benefit of letting me ‘volunteer’ colleagues at the last minute, but does not leave a lasting record of their speech.

Hhmmmmm…it seems that whenever we find one way to do something, another way pops up….

As with all of our projects, you will need to keep watching the blog to see what worked best on the day…

Our first GRASS newsletter

We have had a positive response to the first of several newsletters we hope to produce during our GRASS project. For those of you who have yet to see it, you can find it here: GRASS newsletter

We hope to keep you updated with all of our activities as the project progresses and we also aim to include case studies and examples of best practice around the university – so watch this space!

Welcome Week needs screencasts. Cindy Becker

I’ve been a bit worried recently about Welcome Week, and particularly the module fair. How, I have been thinking, are supposed to let our students know all about our fantastic modules if we can do little more than hand out some outlines and answer questions. Then the solution came to me. We could screencast! With some trepidation, I emailed all convenors of Part One modules in English Literature, asking if they would be prepared to come along to a meeting to talk about it and, despite some trepidation, everyone agreed to think about joining me in the project.

Emma and I then had a chat. Would it be reasonable to ask colleagues who have never used presentation software to use Prezi? Indeed, is Prezi the right vehicle for this? Maybe I should just ask colleagues to send me snippets of text and then I could insert them into a Prezi template? But then would that be leaving them out of the fun of the process? We both thought that having just our voices on every screencast we produce might get a bit boring for our students, so we came to the conclusion that we should probably offer to produce a Prezi and turn it into a screencast, if colleagues would agree to do the voicing over.

Then two things happened today to make me smile. The first was an email I received from a colleague who admits to being a technophobe, yet there within the email was a link to a perfect Prezi she had made over the weekend to show off the Part One module she convenes. Within minutes of looking at it I received an email from Emma to share with me her module description screencast, which uses amazing animation software which I really, really want to learn to use.

It’s amazing how screencasting can brighten up your day…

techno smiley copyright free

Watch this space later in the year – Emma and I will be debating the relative merits of differing approaches to module description screencasts – by then we will have tried out several tactics and will be able to support any colleague who is interested in doing the same.

A surreal Open Day experience. Cindy Becker.

My first foray into a GRASS project public initiative has been great fun – and, luckily, very successful. As a result of watching Emma’s publicity screencast, used on Open Days and such like, I decided to do something similar. We don’t do cake, sadly, so I couldn’t use Emma’s strongest selling point, but we do have a departmental YouTube channel and so I decided to use that instead.

Youtube1

A colleague in my department, Nicola Abram, kindly looped our various YouTube screencasts so that they could play throughout the day (thanks, Nicola!). We then had an office set up (our Head of School kindly donated her office for this) and, by using a mobile projector and screen, with a semi-circle of chairs, we had a small viewing room.

theatre curtains

This was set up right beside the larger room in which we display students’ work and talk with our visitors on a one-to-one basis, so whenever that got too busy and visitors could see that they would have to wait, it was natural for them to take a moment to sit down in the viewing room. We didn’t give any background information to the screencasts beyond that they were produced by students and staff for our YouTube channel, but that seemed to be enough. The screencasts gave, I believe, a genuine flavour of how our department works and what we are trying to achieve. I hope by the next Open Day to have added to our offerings with a suite of screencasts describing all of our modules.

I have learnt that, by showing both student and staff screencasts, there was not too much emphasis placed on the screencasts as the ‘last word’ in any of the topics that were covered – it was more of a taster and I think that our visitors saw that. Next time, I might leave a sheet with some explanation of what is being shown so that viewers can read as well as view. The screencasts certainly generated interest and gave us an ‘added attraction’ on the day. Another colleague, Mary Morrissey, added even more interest in the room at points in the day by using it to demonstrate rare book handling.

rare books

As one of the principles behind the GRASS project is to assess what we are already doing well and then to improve on it, I am pleased to think that this experience falls into that remit. Overall this initiative can be judged a success, but it has also given me ideas about how I could build on that for our next Open Days.

The initiative also gave me one of the most surreal moments of the Open Day. I was striding along to the lecture theatre, running through in my head what I was going to say to our visitors about academic placements. As I thought to myself ‘Good morning, my name is Dr Cindy Becker and I’m….’, I heard exactly that phrase coming from the open door of our screencast room. Most peculiar!