The Product (Atoms, Isotopes and War)

The story is reached from this link, the login asks for an email address, but 123@shaw.ca or anything else that has that form works. The story requires Java to run.

The Promise (Tool Selection)

What I wanted to be able to do was to work through a chemistry or math problem in real time and narrate the process. Research from a social cognitive perspective has shown “that modeling combined with explanation is more effective in teaching skills than explanation alone”.[i] Also, I have come to realize I write in a very academic tone and my hope was that narration might be more conversational and allow me to convey that these aren’t dead subjects and that they are having an impact on our day to day lives and have global implications. The specific story I created was created to serve as a bridge to show how what is normally considered an academic subject (isotopes) was connected to the start of the Gulf War and serve as a proof of concept of being able to work through a problem (subtraction). It will be part of the second week of the course I am working on in MOODLE, Chemistry and Physics Teaching.

In my classroom teaching I use a HP tablet with hand written notes prepared in Windows Journal. Using a stylus allows me or a student to work through a problem more quickly than typing the symbols and formulas would allow. Thus, in creating my digital story, I wanted to be able to repurpose my existing materials in Windows Journal, be able to work through mathematical or chemical problems in real time and provide narration.  I would like to use these worked examples as supplemental examples for my face to face classes or as part of a weekly lesson for a hybrid or online class.

I considered Camtasia or Elluminate to produce the video and did SECTIONS[ii] analysis. The surveys[iii] of the Douglas College students have shown that over 99% have access to a computer and Internet, so students would be able to access video. Both products would allow me to produce the narrated worked example, so both were equivalent in terms of the interactivity and teaching and learning goals I had in mind. Both are available and have some technical support at the College, so are similar in terms of organizational support and novelty. The areas where there were some differences were in terms of ease of use for me as the instructor, costs and speed of making changes. My initial understanding was that I would be able to use the application sharing feature of Elluminate to present the Windows Journal slides on the whiteboard, write on them and record narration. The file would then be available for playback as a link students could click on. Also, for the course I am working on as my MOODLE project and for this Digital Story, it is a new course aimed at elementary school teachers, so speed was also a consideration. I anticipate I will need to do substantial revisions after the first time I have taught the course and have a better sense of what the students needs are. I don’t currently have a copy of Camtasia, so I would have had to export the Windows Journal format that could be read by the computer in the Media Development room. This would add a step to the process and make it slower to make revisions. Also, once I had the file, I would have needed to upload it to the media server, adding another step to the process. Thus, the ease of use and ability to easily make revisions to slides led me to choose Elluminate. The major drawback of this type of recording is that there is no way to edit it once the narration has been added. Making any changes requires rerecording the session, so breaking the recordings up into shorter segments would reduce the barrier to re-recording sessions.

The Reality (Authoring)

I prepared my story in my usual fashion for creating lecture notes – storyboarding on a pad of paper, handwriting sentences in Journal, pasting relevant bits from other courses, making important words red and finding suitable non-copyrighted images to use. I then prepared point form notes and then went to make the recording using Elluminate. The first glitch I discovered was that when I opened Windows Journal via application sharing it shut off the microphone and I couldn’t record narration. I still need to investigate this problem to see if it can be resolved. I then copied and pasted the Windows Journal Pages into PowerPoint and imported these into Elluminate. Unfortunately, this resulted in a loss of image quality and makes the writing look fuzzy and it meant that instead of being able to use the pointing and writing tools from Journal, I had to use the Elluminate pointer and the writing tool, which are not nearly as smooth as those in Journal. Also, once the recording was finished, I realized that when students follow the link to the presentation, they are forced to enter an email address and screen name simply to view the public recording. I am working with our support people to see if there is a better way to link to the recording.

The Future (Lessons Learned)

I would not use the digital story as it stands with students. I don’t feel it is of high enough quality, the prepared writing is fuzzy and the real time writing is atrocious. However, I am happy with the whole product as a story. It is a matter of improving the process of making the story and delivering it to students. If the two glitches with Elluminate can be sorted out (audio with application sharing and a better way to link to directly to the video), then it would be the simplest way to make these recordings.

One of the questions I have been thinking about is how the tool affected how I told the story. Because I was starting from the tool I use in class, my story is still quite close to a lecture and has too much text on the screen. I have been reading Garr Reynolds book Presentation Zen[iv] (PowerPoint isn’t evil, PowerPoint templates and bulleted lists are just bad), and he advocates for using large images and minimal text. Moving forward, I would like these stories to be available through iTunes for playback on mobile devices and the text I am currently using is likely to be unreadable on the smaller screen (it is also part of the reason I choose not to include myself on a webcam, my talking head would simply be too small to make out). I have been wondering if I should in fact move away from Journal to PowerPoint (which I don’t currently use) to force myself into a different medium when  creating materials for online courses, so that I am out of my classroom mode of practice. On my tablet I can still write on PowerPoint slides, having the prepared portion as text would look more professional and the “new medium” would force me to start from scratch and make slides that would work on a smaller screen. I can see this working well for stories that served as a hook to engage students with the material; I will need to do some further investigation to see if I can do a worked example that is legible on the small screen.

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[i] Schunk, D. H. (2008) Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective pg 88. Upper Saddle River, NJ:Pearson.

[ii] Bates, A.W., Poole, G.; Effective Teaching With Technology in Higher Education. 2003, Wiley. Ch 4.

[iii] Douglas College Student Profile and Perceptions Survey 2008, http://www.douglas.bc.ca/__shared/assets/Stu_Profile_Srv_2008_Details55554.pdf, accessed Sept. 16, 2010.

[iv] Reynolds, G. (2008) Presentation Zen. Berkeley, CA; New Riders.

Gulf War Remix

After Elluminate was ruled to be an ineligible player I created a another version of the story using Voicethread – I call it the Gulf War Remix.  I decided to focus on creating a story that would be visually appealing with narration to use at the beginning of my unit on Atoms, Ions and Isotopes. I wanted a hook to engage students and make a connection beyond everyday experience to global politics and achieve a conversational tone. I decided that creating a worked problem in real time was a different goal and wouldn’t fit with this (the first version was 16 minutes and I felt that was too long).

As I outlined in the future directions, I handed something that could potentially play on a mobile device, so I looked for a tool that would allow me to add a voice over to images (in this case from Wikipedia, Wikimedia or Flickr and all are public domain or creative commons images). VoiceThread allows images to be titled and then the title linked to a website. I used this feature to link back to the original source of the images. Moreover, VoiceThread allows for further text and audio comments, so students would be able to post their own comments and questions to the VoiceThread. I would see this as an optional activity, but it does allow for an added dimension of communication.

In terms of authoring, I had to convert svg files to png to get them to display properly. One of the features I liked was that the audio for each page could be recorded, reviewed and saved individually. The little red bar creeping across the screen also forced me to keep my comments short – something I’m sure my students would appreciate.