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

BSL comes to town – a university first?

Cindy writes for her department’s blog:

The Department of English Literature has just published its first British Sign Language interpreted screencast. ‘The Punctuation Pathway’, one of our first ever screencasts, is now available in this format for viewers on our YouTube channel ‘English Literature at the University of Reading’ and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEMQHNparmI

 

 

ppbsl

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?!

GRASS is growing!

More good news for GRASS! I’ve just managed to finish making six brand new explanatory screencasts for the ‘How to’ section of the website. So if you’ve ever wondered how we’re making the screencasts on screencast bank but you only have the odd 60 seconds of spare time, head on over to this new section to watch one of our range of one minute screencasts. If you want to get started with Camtasia, Prezi, Powtoon, screencast.com and video feedback, these videos will not only tell you, but also show you, step by step, in lightning speed! OK so I did go a little beyond the 60 second brief in ‘How to make a screencast in under ten minutes’ but I literally do make a screencast from start to finish in only four minutes to prove how quick and easy this technology really is. I’ll be making lots more of these over the next few weeks so watch out for more fast-talking squeezed into just one minute (ish)!How to cam

Happy anniversary! Cindy writes….

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Well, it is not actually an anniversary as such, although there will be two of those to come before the project finishes. Today is the first official day of our GRASS project and it is also, coincidentally, one of the few days when nobody on the GRASS team has talked to or emailed a fellow GRASS enthusiast to talk about the project!

It seems odd even to think of this as our first day – we have achieved much already and we have put so many plans in place over the summer. Already our students are working with GRASS material and shaping our ideas about how best we can move forward. Having a first day is special, though, as it reminds us that we are now on a proper footing and can go full-steam ahead. One of the great benefits of being offered TLDF funding for a project such as this is that it reminds you that the university is supporting you – that will help to keep us inspired.

So, to my fellow GRASS team…thanks for the fun we have had already and………here we go!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

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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?

 

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

 

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‘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…

Actually PowToon really is packed full of “awesomeness”

OK so I’m normally pretty sceptical about the claims made by companies about how brilliant their new software is but……PowToon really is absolutely awesome. This is a relatively new animation package which allows users to create a combination of a standard presentation and a cartoon. It’s actually surprisingly different to other forms of visual presentation software like Prezi and VideoScribe. Prezi’s USP is the zoomable feature and whole range of easy to import templates. VideoScribe is brilliant if you love trying to guess what the pen or hand drawn picture is going to be. For me PowToon is just fantastic for the enormous range and quality of the animation available. Like Prezi, it’s totally free and like VideoScribe it’s entirely intuitive and unbelievably easy to grasp. Just to prove this I made the one minute PowToon below two hours after I first opened my free account on Wednesday night AND (this is very unlike me) I didn’t even watch the tutorials….

BFD powtoon

I admit that I did use part of a PowToon template to make this one but creating this was so quick that I grabbed a bit of spare time yesterday to see what I could do on my own. I loved the animated characters so I stuck to this theme for an American Government module summary. Having played around a bit with whole animated families, transitions, the use of props, flipping images and backgrounds I made this 50 second PowToon in about two hours and I had an enormous amount of fun along the way!

AMG summary

I admit that this is really cartoon focused but PowToon is perfectly capably of making much more ‘grown-up’ presentations using much more ‘business like’ animations. The range of characters, backgrounds and transitions is huge so the range of styles the user can adopt is massive and this makes PowToon a real winner for me. But that’s just me!!! I haven’t been an actual undergraduate for a long time now so I really wanted to find out what my students would think. It’s how to get their attention that interests me. So I’ve e-mailed all my personal tutees with three very different types of one minute module summary to see which they like best and why. On offer were:

1. My PowTooned American Government summary:

AMG sum2

2. My VideoScribed British Government summary:

BFD summary

3. My Prezied Work Experience Year summary:

WEP image

I’m just starting to receive replies so I’ll update the blog as soon as we have a winner! In the meantime I’m back to PowToon to see what else I can muster up over the weekend!

‘Screencast Bank’ is up and running!!!

BankMore exciting news-The ‘Screencast Bank’ section of our website is now populated with a whole range of different screencasts. Head over to this section on the titles bar and you will find a variety of UG and PG student information and support screencasts, staff training, module summary and screencast project overviews.

I created the majority of these last Autumn for staff and students in my own School of Politics, Economics and International relations. Most of these have been made using screen captured Prezis but one or two are screen captured VideoScribes.

Together they have registered 1,924 views since November 2013. The vast majority of viewers are Reading students although surprisingly Google Analytics tells me that my screencasts have been seen in Sydney (12 views), Florence (5 views), Alexandria (2 views) and Monrovia (3 views). I’m actually registering views in almost every continent!

This ‘Screencast Bank’ should be a useful place to start if you are thinking about different ways of incorporating screen capture in your teaching or student support provision.

Just finally-there are no prizes for spotting that, at last, I bought myself an actual microphone a few weeks ago rather than relying on the internal microphone on my laptop. The sound quality on the floating island screen cast overview is infinitely better. At last it sounds like I have left what might have appeared to be a noisy tin room! Exciting times!