Blogging Pedagogy - screencasting

On Weather Cancellations and Digital Media Experiments

Lindsey Gay — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 12:20:21 +0000

Author:

Lindsey Gay

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Normally we have very mild minters here in Austin; however, this winter has been colder than usual. As a result, we’ve had a number of days where ice coated the roads, making the region’s many elevated highways and bridges very dangerous. For better or for worse, UT has closed the campus several times and initiated late starts several times more. Normally these delayed starts began between 10am and noon. As my Rhetoric of Death and Dying class runs from 9:30 to 11 am, any weather delays impact the course. In fact, we’ve had two classes cancelled and three others delayed by at least half an hour! For a course that meets only twice a week, every class day is very necessary; therefore, being almost two weeks behind in my curriculum before Spring Break has proven very challenging.

When my class was full-on canceled the first time, I was already on campus. UT officials made the call rather late, to the ire of many, but I decided to make the most of the situation. Since I had a quiet DWRL room, a computer with a webcam, and several hours at my disposal, I decided to record the day’s lecture and part of the lesson. I figured that not only could I reduce the amount of catch-up my students would have to do, but I would hopefully familiarize myself more strongly with the same digital media projects I’ve been asking my students to create.

I created a video in Windows Movie Maker by combining webcam footage of me lecturing with screen captures of the readings and other course material I had planned to discuss that day. Using the screen-capture tool Camtasia, I attempted to navigate through the material as if I were showing it to the students in real-time. There were several drawbacks: the lighting wasn’t optimal (thanks, fluorescent overheads!); I struggled with the audio capture (for some reason, about half of my sound files recorded but were incompatible with Camtasia, resulting in me having to record some portions of audio two or three times); overall the video ended up being VERY amateurish (to my eyes!). Nevertheless, at least my students had something to take away from an otherwise throwaway class day. After emailing them the video link and cautioning them that they’d be responsible for viewing it, doing the activities discussed, and knowing the material for the next class, I hoped they’d watch it.

Polling them the next class day, I found that only about one-third of them had watched the video. I warned them that we didn’t have enough time to go over the material (important stuff about ethical and pathetic appeals) so if they fell behind, it would be their own fault. Needless to say, I also found their scanty participation a poor repayment for my efforts. Cue hurt feelings.

The second time the university decided to cancel morning classes, it at least gave everyone plenty of notice, so I didn’t make an unnecessary trip to campus. This time, I thought I would turn my lecture on definitional arguments into a PowerPoint, and I wanted experiment by adding a voice-over. This would add important discussional elements into the presentation by making me write less and talk more.

Writing the PowerPoint took only half an hour. Then, I tried to use the audio recorder function built in to PowerPoint, because I hoped to avoid having to merge audio and PPT files in some other program. Unfortunately, once again, audio recording was my downfall. Though I made several test runs to ensure the sound was recording AND that I could advance through bullet points and slides in sync with the audio, the recording ultimately failed. I spent 40 minutes talking at my computer, only to find when I played back the whole presentation that the audio cut out about halfway through each slide. I was too frustrated to troubleshoot the problem, and I had afternoon meetings to keep, so I just rewrote the slides to be more text-heavy than I’d usually prefer. I sent it off to my students with instructions to view the PowerPoint and my apologies that I couldn’t get the sound to work. On the plus side, when I polled the class the next day asking how many of them viewed the presentation, about three-quarters of them raised their hands. It seemed they learned a lesson from the first cancelation, and the other shortened classes, AND from my lamentations about these course-shortening problems.

By the time Spring Break rolled around I was still about a week behind in my syllabus. Over the break, I reworked the rest of the term’s schedule slightly. This resulted in the next few weeks emphasizing skill development and leaving less time to luxuriate in discussing the many arguments around death and dying. The main lessons I learned—besides keeping my syllabus somewhat flexible—is that I have a long way to go before I make a really solid foray into the realm of the audiovisual. These experiences gave me a greater respect for my students’ efforts making their final projects (in various multimedia formats). My failures also gave me some ideas on how to better prepare my students for frustrations they may encounter as well.

Screencast Feedback with Jing

Axel Bohmann — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 02:51:31 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

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Techsmith

After teaching RHE 306 for my second semester, I still have not fully decided on a consistent system for students to turn in their work. Electronic copies have a couple of advantages that pertain to the particular format of the class: a) different versions can easily be compared in text processing software (it’s called “merge documents” in LibreOffice and in Word). In a course that highlights writing as a process and the role of revision, this helps gauge the extent of changes made from one stage to the next. b) Very often, assignment deadlines occur in rapid succession and it is important for students to get feedback as soon as possible. An electronic copy can be marked, graded and returned promptly, whereas with a paper copy you have to wait at least until the next class day. Especially the smaller, one-page assignments I try to return within 24 hours in order to not slow down the work flow.

Yet I usually ask students to bring print copies of their assignments to turn in in class. For one thing, I already find myself staring at a computer screen for too much time every day and it is nice to take a stack of papers to the park or the pool and do grading there. More importantly though, paper copies allow me to make in-text and marginal comments with an ease and precision that I can’t seem to get with text processing software, even with the “comment” and “track changes” functions.

However, recently Mary Hedengren (all credit to her) pointed me to a piece of software that may mitigate the latter problem and give some additional benefits. It’s called Jing and it is a screenshot/screencast program. There is nothing really fancy to it and I am sure there are other applications that do similar stuff, but it still seems really useful.

So, here is what you can do with it: Open the paper you want to give feedback on. Connect a headset or other microphone, or use the built-in one if that is good enough. Start Jing and have it video cap the window containing the document you are working with and simultaneously record audio from the mic. Go through the paper, highlight aspects, comment on them, maybe give real-time examples of how to make a not-so-good sentence/transition/source attribution/etc. into a better one. Save the product as an SWF video file. Send it to your student.

Here is what I think are the advantages of using Jing with electronic copies. Obviously, everything I said about electronic copies in general still applies. In addition, it seems like it will be much easier to give precise feedback on individual passages. The easiest way to do this, it seems to me, would be to highlight the passages you want to talk about in advance and then address each one verbally as you go through. Scrolling back for cross-references is also easy enough.

The real strength here in my opinion is that sending a video makes the feedback you give to students a lot more personal. There is so much potential for misunderstandings with written comments because they are entirely stripped of non-verbal cues like inflection, stress, etc. This is one of the reasons we ideally would like all of our students to come to office hours all the time (well, maybe not quite that, but you get the idea). Jing seems to offer perhaps the next best thing to actual face-to-face feedback. Plus, the free version of the program has the 'affordance' of allowing no more than 5 minutes of video to be recorded at one time. So there is an automatic safeguard against spending too much time on one paper built into the program.

From a student's perspective, I see three chief advantages. The first one is the way they are likely to perceive feedback. I feel a recording of your professor actually talking to you would make you feel a lot more valued as a person than detached written comments. Of course, this depends on the tone of the writing/recording as well, but I feel it is fair to say it holds in general.

The second point is related to the first. Like many colleagues, I am concerned whether students actually take time to read my written comments (let alone re-read them). An audiovisual recording provides a mode of engagement that I hope students will be more open to.

Finally, I have often found there to be a bit of a gap in terms of what I prioritize in grading and what parts of my feedback students focus on most. This is especially true when students read the comments as a justification of their grade: “But you said I had a good introduction, so why am I not getting an A.” Here, the screencast format should also make it easier for students to see where the focus lies, simply by allowing the instructor to insert meta-comments (“and this is really what you need to work on to get an A in revision,” etc.) more easily.

Unfortunately, all of the above remains hypothetical so far. I have not had a chance to try Jing in my class yet since I only very recently heard of it. But my students are turning their next major assignment in at the end of the week, and I'll definitely try it for that. Will keep you posted-