Tuesday 17 January 2012

Tips for new bloggers!

Since I've just played a recording Jenni made for me to help workout how to provide my blog address to the group, I thought I'd share how helpful and personalised I found this.  It was like Jenni was right there beside me helping me work out how to do it.

This is a useful experience for me because I would have assumed it was onerous to do an individual video, but apparently not.  I can see it could be useful to ensure students get the right points out of my feedback.  I sometimes wonder if they read written feedback and/or get the key points I'm trying to make.  A recording would be easier for them and much clearer.

Now I've discovered my laptop does have a camera I think I can give this a try.

4 comments:

  1. Hello Helen
    I'm glad you liked to video. Yes, it is very easy to create quick short, personalised videos. The tool I used was JING - a free download from the web. The thing I like about this tool is as soon as I finish recording it automatically uploads the recording to my www.screencast.com account and copies the URL to the clipboard on my computer. So all I need to do to share it is paste the URL into an email, Skype chat or the comments section on your blog :)
    Video of me recording a video - http://screencast.com/t/99JrxhH5kc

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  2. Hi Helen,
    You could also create little videos that answer questions or explain difficult concepts etc. These are a fantastic re-usable resource if you are careful not to include or mention things in them that become out of date by the next semester or iteration of your unit. You would undoubtably have a very strong idea of the sort of questions or areas of difficulty or common errors in student work that keep coming up time and again and so you could create for yourself a little "bank" of videos to use time and again.

    Students certainly do seem to respond well to visual forms of feedback. I know of a course here at ECU where students receive a PDF document with the marks and rubric in it, AND a video from the lecturer/marker, and apparently the statistics around the number of students actually bothering to look at the feedback has shot through the roof! Many students have apparently fed back that they even show the feedback to their parents or family (if they are pleased with it of course!).

    Good luck with your experiment.

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  3. Thanks Leitha. I was just (10 minutes ago) talking to a colleague who also told me I can use my iphone or camtasia (accessible on my ECU pc) to do this. I hadn't thought of doing these little 'quickies' - I assumed camtasia was for recording whole lectures. And I really hadn't even thought of using my iphone!

    I can put a quick 'hello' video or explain complex issues. I suppose I never realised it was so easy. And you're so right about the same things coming up each semester. A bank of little videos would be really helpful.

    Am meeting my online unit's sesional lecturer this afternoon so will also discuss with her. We can both come up with some ideas :-)

    Thanks for your feedback.

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  4. Hi Helen,
    I'm pretty new to all this as well and have started to experiment with the video recording. It is so easy to do - I record using the Quicktime player that came with my computer. I have created a YouTube channel where I store my videos and then provide a link to the video when people need it, or embed them in my unit website. One problem of this is that I find it so enjoyable to create these resources I find myself working longer than i ought to!
    Brad

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