Erasing the Past: what the chalkboard taught us
As with Bolter’s notion of remediation, my project considers the chalkboard as a pre-digital innovation that had a profound effect on how we teach and learn. The remediation is from individual slates to the chalkboard. The affordance of being able to present information to a larger audience simultaneously as opposed to the teacher having to attend to each individual students’ slate was far more efficient and accommodated a larger population of students. Visual elements combined with aural lessons allowed for learners to make more connections with their learning and subsequently more effective knowledge acquisition. In essence, the age of “chalk and talk” was born. I would argue that a lesson at the chalkboard need not be presented as a full on lecture, but that the chalkboard can be used to reinforce a class discussion or an interactive lesson in such a way that is superior to other technologies.
I chose to create the video documentary in GoAnimate for Schools. I acquired the license for this last year. I was a previous staunch user of its predecessor, Xtranormal. There are certainly some ways in which GoAnimate has remediated Xtranormal. It is easier to work with animation and the drag and drop is very intuitive. The library of animations, props and poses are phenomenal. The character automatically synced with my audio recording. That was neat! The drawback with the audio is that it can only be worked with in 20 second clips. This is far too restrictive and made for some difficult challenges in script-writing and production. Uploading the audio, previewing and creating a final video took an excessive amount of time (I’m afraid I have become a part of the now generation). Also, the whole enterprise is extremely time-consuming if you are diligent to get things “just so”. As a second try using the application, it was a lot of fun! The more experience you have with it, the better it gets.
Click here to link to the youtube video.
Click below to open the script & references document.
Hi, it says your video is private… may need to change the settings.
Thanks for the heads up!
Hey Janet,
Do you mind if I use your documentary for my part of my Rip, Feed, Mix?
Sorry, Adam, didn’t check back here for this. Of course, I would have been honoured.