Vassar’s Moodle system has a new tool, with the possibly too cutesy name of “PoodLL.” PoodLL provides a bridge between Moodle and the camera and/or microphone on a person’s computer. There are two main ways it can be used:
1. An instructor can record a video or audio message directly onto the main page of a Moodle course, or into the instructions of a discussion forum, or even into the description field associated with a file. Previously you would have to use some other software to make the recording, then upload it into Moodle; now no other software is necessary.
Are there things that come across better when seen or heard than when read? A poem or a foreign language passage? A view of a physical object or action? Here’s how to use PoodLL to make the recording:
2. You can create an assignment (or a quiz) in which students reply by recording themselves. Many instructors use Moodle’s Assignment activity to collect files (like research papers or homework exercises) from students. Now the Assignment activity can also be used to collect video or audio recordings from students.
One of the most obvious uses of this is to ask foreign language students to record themselves speaking in the target language, but be creative! A lab instructor could ask students to make a brief video showing the results of their procedure. Drama students could record a dramatic reading. Here’s how to create an assignment that lets students record their responses:
If you’re not yet feeling muddled by Moodle’s PoodLL, you might try noodling with an audio or fiddling with a video. There’s also a whiteboard function, so you could doodle in Moodle’s PoodLL. More on that in a separate post.
Interview with Erin McCloskey Prof. Erin McCloskey, of the Education department, explains how she uses digital storytelling technology as a vehicle for Vassar students and area adolescents to learn from each other. (4:38)
Interview with Marc L. Smith and Jodi Schwarz
Profs. Jodi Schwarz of the Biology department and Marc Smith of the Computer Science department, discuss their use of Google Apps for Education in their course on Bioinformatics. They’ve created a course website using Google Sites, with links to course documents, articles, and presentations in Google Drive. Students share materials that they create in their collaborative groups. (4:20)
Interview with April Beisaw
Prof. April Beisaw, from the Anthropology department, talks about he she gets her Introduction to Archaeology students to “do archaeology,” using handheld GPS units in the field. Students photograph artifacts in the field and embed location data into the photos, and have a record of exactly where they surveyed. (3:60)
Interview with Bert Lott
Prof. Bert Lott, from the Greek & Roman Studies department, talks about an online commentary system that he uses in his Latin courses. His students are directed to add marginalia to an online edition of a classical text, and to comment on each others’ entries. (3:07)
Interview with Cindy Schwarz
Prof. Cindy Schwarz, of the Physics & Astronomy Department, describes how she used the iBooks Author software to create an interactive, electronic edition of a children’s book she had published earlier, and discusses how the technology could be used at the college level. (2:53)
Not too long ago I posted about Final Cut Pro X being an awesome tool for students new to video editing. I was in a class yesterday where the students blew me away with their outstanding work, after just one hour’s worth of training. I was so excited, I wanted to share their work with you.
The Context: The past few years I’ve worked with Professor Erin McCloskey and her EDUC 373: Adolescent Literacy classes. During the course of the semester, Vassar students are paired with area middle- and high school students. They work together developing stories, podcasts, videos and multimedia. We’ve used WordPress blogs to host, document and present their work, to share with classmates and parents. For the Vassar students to introduce themselves to their middle-school partners (and to their VC peers), we asked them to produce 1 to 2-minute digital autobiographies.
The Workshop: Last week during class, I trained the students in FCP X, and this week they posted their stupendous digital autobiographies. I asked them during their presentations if they had ever edited videos before. Most had little to no experience with video. I wanted to share these videos as the assignment really played to the strengths of the students. These are highly personal and very charming.
Student Videos: Here are a few representative examples (but all of the stories were great in their own way):
I showed them how to make their autobiographies in FCP X, but a few students did some interesting things on their own. Logan made an animated movie using his laptop’s camera. Stephanie combined her love of photography and used the YouTube Editor and FCP X to make this video.
We had a great class yesterday (2nd in the semester) sharing these videos with each other. Next week the VC students will use their videos to introduce themselves to their middle- or high- school partners. Professor McCloskey led a dynamic follow-up discussion where she asked her students to reflect upon the difficulties they encountered creating their videos, and how that experience could possibly provide insight when they begin to work with their adolescent literacy partners.
The term “interactive PDF” refers to a PDF file designed to be viewed on screen. Interactive PDF features are the parts of a PDF that provide your audience with additional functions that are more commonly found in websites. Some of these features include buttons, hyperlinks, rollover states, embedded sound, and video, among others.
Designing an interactive PDF might be advantageous when you want to create an interactive experience for your reader but don’t necessarily want to place this content on a website. Using Adobe InDesign also allows for total creative control of your design, unlike most blog or webpage templates. Another advantage to creating an interactive PDF is that the file size is generally small and easily sent by email.
There are some disadvantages to this format though. To take advantage of the interactive features, your reader must view the file in Adobe Reader. If the file is opened in a web browser or other programs like Preview, the results are often unpredictable. Another drawback is that while InDesign is a powerful program, it takes some time to learn the design workflow. I have found Lynda.com tutorials to be very helpful in providing basic introductions for creating interactive PDFs.
Recently, Vassar’s Art History Department chose to use the interactive PDF format to build study guides for Art 106. Students in this course are required to identify many works of art and architecture, but making these images available to students in a clear and concise manner has been a challenge for faculty. Interactive PDFs allow students to view a thumbnail image of each work, along with the corresponding metadata. When these thumbnails are clicked, they link to the Luna database that stores high-resolution, and detail views of each work. When the viewer scrolls over each thumbnail, the caption next to the image disappears. Scrolling on and off the image functions like using a flashcard, and is useful for self-quizzing. Even though this format is designed to be viewed on screen, it can easily be printed as well.
Here are links to two interactive PDfs that demonstrate several of the features mentioned in this post. For proper functionality, remember to view these documents in Adobe Reader.
Narrated recordings of slides can be useful for providing supplementary information to students, or to help prepare for upcoming class activities. They can serve as a component of a flipped, or partially-flipped, classroom, or simply provide complementary material for a traditionally-structured classroom. Microsoft PowerPoint and Macintosh’s Keynote are two of the most popular software options for producing slideshows. In Keynote, narration of a slideshow results in a single audio file, whereas a PowerPoint slideshow narration produces individual audio clips for each slide. The single audio file model of Keynote introduces some difficulties when one wants to insert a slide, or rearrange slides, after the full presentation has been recorded. While one can generate individual audio clips in an external program, such as QuickTime Player, and drag them into Keynote, it is not a simple process and, in the end, PowerPoint wins out for the flexibility and simplicity offered by its model of an individual audio clip for each slide.
Using your computer’s built-in microphone or a USB microphone, you can create your own narrated slideshow. The following instructions are specific to a Mac, however the procedure is very similar when using a PC. After connecting the mic, if necessary, be sure to select the appropriate audio input/output source in system preferences. Open your PowerPoint file and select the first slide. Click the tab labeled Slide Show. Then, under Presenter Tools, select Record Slide Show. After selecting Record Slide Show, the audio recording screen opens and recording starts immediately. You can pause ( ll ), restart ( ↺ ) & continue ( ▷ ) as needed. Click on the forward arrow at the bottom of the current slide (or use arrow keys) to advance. Press the esc button or Exit Show at top-center to finish recording. Select yes when asked if you want to save your slide timings (this includes audio). As you can see, the procedure for creating a narrated slideshow in PowerPoint is quite simple.
Screenshot of audio recording in PowerPoint on a Mac.
Any subsequent editing is also straightforward. For example, to re-record audio for a single slide, simply select the slide, then select Slide Show → Record Slide Show. Make your recording for the individual slide and esc, or Exit Show, when finished. You may also insert a new slide anywhere in the lineup and add audio to that single slide without causing the audio to fall out of sync on the original slides. Another layer of multi-media that one may take advantage of is that of adding video/movie clips to slides. It is not a difficult task and may be worth exploring as an additional enhancement to your presentation.
It is important to save your presentation as PowerPoint Presentation with the filename extension *.pptx. The format designed to be compatible with earlier versions of PowerPoint (PowerPoint 97-2003 Presentation), which uses the extension *.ppt, has a number of features disabled. As a result, students watching the slideshow on a Windows machine will not be able to take advantage of the “s” shortcut for pausing and restarting the presentation. Finally, when you are ready to share your presentation with students by posting it on your Moodle site, for example, you may wish to save it as a PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx). When students double-click on the file icon, it will automatically launch into the show mode, and they won’t be able to edit your slides.
If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact Shelly Johnson, ACS liaison for the Sciences, at x7866 or mijohnson@vassar.edu.
Last summer the decision was made to use Final Cut Pro X as the supported video editing software for Vassar students. CIS deployed FCP X in the Film Department’s editing labs as well as in the Digital Media Zone in the library. To help us adapt to the switch from beloved FCP 7 to FCP X, we organized an on-campus workshop with Roberto Mighty. For two days Film faculty and CIS employees worked shoulder to shoulder, getting valuable hands-on experience with an interface that was new to most of us. There had been quite a controversy about Apple’s changes from FCP 7 to FCP X, and most of us were apprehensive about the switch. But after two days of excellent instruction, our general sense was that the FCP X could generally do anything FCP 7 did, and it did some things better. I was looking forward to using it with students.
Using FCP X for Digital Storytelling
Past years I’ve worked with French Faculty with students who were tasked with creating digital storybooks. (For more on the pedagogical goals of this project, I invite you to read Digital Storytelling in Intermediate French.) Early in the fall, I met with Tom Parker and Mark Andrews to discuss their classes’ projects. In small groups, the students compose and illustrate children’s storybooks in French, which they scan and narrate. Previously we’d uploaded the images to VoiceThread and done the recordings via their online Flash interface. Students were able to upload and record easily enough, but I found other aspects of VoiceThread lacking (editing, layering audio, search, embedding, restrictive licensing, to name a few). FCP might be harder to learn, but once learned, they would have total flexibility on how they created their projects and they would have a skill that might be used for another project or life after college. Tom and Mark were amenable to the idea so we tried it out.
I only had an hour with the students so it was a bit of a challenge to cover the essentials in such a short period. Luckily, their projects only required them to import their scanned storybook pages into FCP X, then record narration. We spent a fair amount of time doing practice narration. We touched briefly on titles, incorporating sounds and music, and exporting. Students that had brought scans of all of their storybook pages were able to get a significant amount of work done during the workshop. One of the classes was able to have a follow-up workshop where I was able to work with each group, advising and troubleshooting. This was extremely valuable and I wish we had been able to schedule this for both classes. Generally speaking, students adapted well to FCP X and were quite successful. I don’t think I would have been confident enough to use FCP 7 in the same way. Here is an example:
I liked how they were able to incorporate both their narration and some sound effects. The use of titles, music and end credits added a bit of polish too. I should add that most of the students I work with have little to no experience with video or sound editing.
America in the World Digital Narratives
Eve Dunbar and Carlos Alamos co-taught AMST 250: America in the World this past fall. For one of their major assignments, students could choose to write a paper, create a podcast, or a a digital narrative. I trained the entire class to edit audio, but a couple students were interested in using video for their digital narratives, so I met with them one-on-one. The students were able to start editing after an hour of training. Here’s an ambitious project that a student put together based on interviews she made using her phone:
FCP X FTW!
So for me and my work, FCP X has been a win. It is an easy to learn and very capable video editing platform. Students are able to get up and running with their video projects in a way that would have been too daunting to attempt in FCP 7. (One hurdle is that special formatting is required for projects on external drives to show up in FCP X.) Students do have the option to download a trial version of FCP X, which is often all they need to get through a project.
I’ve already got one class scheduled to use FCP X this semester: Candice Swift’s ANTH 245: The Ethnographer’s Craft is going to use FCP X to create digital enthnographies; they will use Final Cut to create voice-overs on top of stills and video. I am looking forward to this FCP X project and others like it this spring.
