Tag Archives: Emma Mayhew

I love powtoons too!

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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.

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

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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…

Welcome Week needs screencasts. Cindy Becker

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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.

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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!