Screencasting for just-in-time teaching and learning

Via OL Daily–and the timing couldn’t have been better–a list of screencasting tools from Mashable.  I’m a big fan of using (short) screencasted clips to help students–but mostly instructors–get oriented to tech tools. I’m reminded of a time (circa 2000 or so) when I was a digital media student at a small college where the instructor’s idea of ‘teaching’ was to print out the online manuals for the software and distribute them to the class, then hide in his office while we ‘learned’ Photoshop, Director, and Premier.  Sure, there’s a lot to be said about learning by doing, but when one of the students came across a site full of screencasted tutorials we felt like we’d hit the jackpot.  Oddly, the instructor resented us using the screencasts, and if I recall correctly he might have even blocked the site at some point.   Anyhow, the experience taught me that some things that need to be learned are very well suited to screencasting.  I’ve dabbled with ScreenRecord on my Mac  and have been quite pleased, but I’m keen to try some of the others on the list.  My thought is follow up f2f demos of tools with some screencasts that instructors can access on their own time, and if I’m lucky, I won’t have to create very many since some good people are quite happy to share them on YouTube and the like.

metablogging

Via the blog of proximal development I came across 21 classes, which is getting parked here because I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, and it will no doubt be handy at some point. It looks like it provides a way for an instructor and student to manage individual blogs via a class blog portal.  I recently tried explaining to some IT people that something like this would be useful, but did a pretty bad job of it, so it’s nice there’s an easier way.

 

interactive narratives

I came across the interactive narratives site about 3 or 4 years ago and have continued to visit it regularly–it offers compelling multimedia presentations on huge variety of topics, and I can easily lose an hour in it. I’ve always thought that these interactive narratives were the closest thing to how I conceptualized an educational ‘learning object’ (remember those?) since they accomplish many things that educators hoped that multimedia learning objects could provide–interesting, interactive, multimodal presentations of content. The narratives on this site constitute some fantastic uses of Flash coupled with good graphic design, 2 things that tend to be out of reach for most instructors at many institutions. The pachyderm project does a great job of making this idea more accessible, but to date Canadian Polytechnic is not signed up.

Along the same lines, I continue to be impressed with Yale’s Cardiothoracic imaging site, which in my view is one of the best educational examples of what a ‘learning object’ could or should be. I first came across this site in about 2000 when, as a digital media intern at a local university, I was asked to find examples of multimedia learning objects. This site judiciously combined great graphics, audio, 3d animation, video, and text in a meaningful and well thought out way. Case in point here, where graphic, 3d imaging, and text combine or here, which uses a simple rollover graphic and makes available the actual reference xray image in combination with text. Cases are also included in the index, with this one providing audio (that doesn’t simply read the text notes), and a more detailed zoomed image. I see that the site won an award in 2005, and I’m incredibly happy that the developers are so open in their CC licensing about making it available and usable to all.

Teaching wikis, blogs, RSS, and social bookmarking

I want to pass on a great resource for instructors who need to explain wikis, blogs, RSS, Google Docs, social bookmarking and other such tools to their students. Common Craft have created some of the most effective, to-the-point, and entertaining instructional videos I’ve ever seen; many of the topics they address in their unique, short videos fall squarely under the ed tech category:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Google Docs in Plain English

All of these tools are easy to use but, admittedly, can be hard to describe. Common Craft completely demystifies them. Have a look: