Category Archives: YouTube

Teaching and Technology in German

One of my students, Patrick Modrovsky, is majoring in broadcasting and minoring in German. He thought that interviewing me and talking about the way I use technology in the classroom to teach German language and culture might be newsworthy. Here is the link:

http://utanews.com/ March 11, 2010 (The date is important, because as time goes by, older news items “are scrolled” down to the bottom of the page.)

I understand from Pete Smith that Peggy Semingson does a lot with video. I couldn’t find what you have your students do with video, Peggy (I need to go back to your post), but found your blog and your youtube site again, Electronica and Literacy (http://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson). Students must be thinking, judging, involved, and engaged when producing something that could be used as a portfolio piece.

It seems there are two areas where technology can intersect with active learning: 1) instructor methods and materials and 2) student interactive learning and demonstration of learning/thinking.

How can screencasts improve active learning?

It’s a pretty counter-intuitive notion: putting some [or even all!] of your lectures on-line can help open your classroom for active learning. After all, we associate on-line lectures with distance education. For many faculty that may seem to be a far cry from the kind of face-to-face classroom interaction associated with active learning.

But I believe that screencasting — a relatively simple technique for making on-line videos by recording your voice along with the image of your computer screen — needs to become part of the teaching arsenal of more professors. Here are 5 reasons why:

  1. Research and experience suggests that students learn best in brief sessions, but this can be difficult to achieve in the classroom.
  2. As this story from the PBS Newshour relates, students are seeking out screencasts on their own to complement to traditional lectures.
  3. Students like them — they enjoy the control and the portability of this YouTube-style format.
  4. There are now many different ways of making screencasts and some of the software is free.
  5. For me, here’s the most important point: Screencasts can be more efficient than a traditional lecture. I have discovered that in a ten minute screencast, — this usually takes the form of a narrated PowerPoint presentation but there are many other possibilities [example] — I can explain an event, illustrate a concept, or tell a story that might have taken twenty minutes to communicate in a class.  If a student didn’t understand what I said, he or she can replay the screencast as often as needed.

In other words, in 50 minutes worth of screencasts — the equivalent of a single class contact hour — I can deliver lecture material that used to require two class sessions. Since I make it a point to keep my screencasts brief — never more than 10 minutes —  students can access the material in short sessions that fit their attention span and schedule.  Because they control the pause button and the replay function, I’ve seen comprehension of difficult concepts increase dramatically in my world history survey.

But the point of a screencast is NOT to keep the Internet between me and my students. The point is to free up more in-class time for discussions, simulations, debates, in-class writing, small-group work, and other active learning. If I “cancel” Monday’s class, assigning students to  watch 5 ten-minute screencasts, I can make Wednesday’s meeting a very rich experience because students have already heard my stories and explanations. Using a brief quiz, a one-minute paper, or a discussion I can quickly ascertain what they learned and what didn’t make sense. Then we can push their understanding further, without resorting to lectures.

This is essentially a variation on the “Teaching Naked” concept that Jose Bowen of SMU has been advocating for the past several years. But it isn’t necessary to convert hours and hours of lectures into brief webcasts to take advantage of this technology. We all have instructions and concepts that are essential for our class  classes. Even more than traditional lecture material, these sorts of foundational explanations are ideal for webcasting; students who need to can watch them throughout the semester.

Here’s a list of some useful types of webcasts that could streamline any course and improve students’ experience:

1. A description of mistakes students commonly make in an assignment, preferably in the form of screencast comments on an anonymous example from a previous semester.
2. A demonstration of computer techniques, like internet and database searches, or the use of software.
3. An exposition of key concepts in the course, particularly difficult ones that students will need to return to.
4. A presentation of a topic that has a complex visual component that may be seen more clearly in screencast mode.
5. An explanation of a game or procedure before a class session where time is limited.

There’s no space here to describe how to make a screencast or to list some basic caveats for those who want to experiment with this medium. That will have to wait for a subsequent post!

John Garrigus

Digital Texts in the Composition Classroom, Feb 25th

Early adopters find ways to teach complex concepts, methods and software flying by the seat of our pants to be sure, but buoyed by much early trial and error experience acquired from having taught ourselves. For someone like me, whose field is digital media, I have made that seat-of-the-pants stuff my specialty, and, as a result, I am frequently called upon to teach less-experienced others how to teach using digital tools. One particularly challenging course in the English Department is First Year Composition. It may just be the toughest course to teach well and yet it is most often taught by our least experienced staff: our graduate students.

Those students recently asked me if I would come and lead a workshop for them on digital texts for the composition classroom. These new teachers face tough hurdles trying to retool green students into better writers. Their job gets tougher every year as what constitutes ‘writing’ continues to incorporate more multimodal objects (sound, image, video, etc.). The challenge for them is tougher still because they come from a generation that is often less digitally experienced than their students. Fortunately, in the English Department at least, they are not without resources. I lead a series of workshops on digital literacies, pedagogies, and research methods that give our students some tools for their own teaching up front, but they wanted more specifics that were designed for teaching the ever-so-unforgiving Comp. This workshop will take place on Thursday, February 25th from 12:00 to 1:30 or so in the eCreate Lab, located in Preston Hall 310. Please join us if you think the material might be of interest to you too.

Free, easy-to-use authoring tools that I will be discussing will include:

Voicethread, an online brainstorming tool for discussing texts, including powerpoint, video or screencasts

ccMixter, creative commons-based audio remixes

Piclits, an online tool for adding text to an image

Mixbook, an online scrapbook creator

Glogster, an online interactive poster creation tool

Xtranormal, an online text-to-movie animation creator

and

Animoto (for education version): an automated video creator that sutures narration, images, audio and video together into 30-second ‘trailers’

Drop me an email if you want more information: carolyn (dot) guertin (at) gmail (dot) com. If you come, be prepared to get your hands dirty :-).

Cheers,
Carolyn Guertin
Director, eCreate Lab
Dept of English
https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/

Ideas

iol2Here are some of my ideas I am doing. I teach LIST courses (Literacy studies) in the College of Education and Health Professions. I am a second year professor. Here is  my webpage: http://www3.uta.edu/faculty/peggys/index.html

1. Blogging with both online Master’s students and pre-service teachers in a shared space.

2. Using student authored video and professor authored videos. The professor authored videos are generally mini-lectures, book talks, or brief demonstrations. The students have reported they like them. Please feel free to leave comments on any of my YouTube videos and ideas on ways to better use the YouTube site.

3. Another thought I have about information sharing from the web on our course blog for Literacy Studies: teachers and teacher candidates often look to the web for teaching ideas and activites that are “ready to go”. However, we need to teach them how to carefully and critically evaluate this information. There’s “too much information” on the web.


How can we as educators of teacher candidates best steer students towards web resources that they can use and evaluate  for their current and future lesson plans? E.g., how do we teach them to “navigate” the teacher resources out there so they don’t go straight to the worksheet sites.
The blog might be one tool to compile resources, foster their own searches, and have them use targeted, “pre-filtered” websites like http://readwritethink.org which is a site affiliated with our major literacy professional organizations.

http://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson

Welcome to “Soundings”!

magna-vox

“Soundings,” a best practices network for pedagogical technology at UTA, came about as a result of discussions I have had with many of its now-authors—talks which highlighted for me the need for an electronic space where we might reflect on the deeper questions of technology in teaching, learning, and education.

Watching the creative practice of Gina Thames, Chris Conway, Lana Rings, Blake Carpenter, Peggy Semingson, Carolyn Guertin, and so many others on campus has been and is a constant joy for me. What better than to ask them, and all of you as readers, to reflect on their practice? So that is just what I did. And with the expert help of Scott Massey in shaping and making this space functional, you are now about to enter one of the most fascinating digital gatherings I can imagine.

And so, as any good host would, I stand here at the virtual door, greeting all of our invited and occasional authors and readers to this space. Now, on to the digital hors d’oeuvres and main courses….