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Tag: multimedia

Digital storytelling Tutorial: How I created a “Powtoon” special

November 13, 2024 /

Summary (What)

For my first inquiry tutorial I chose something I felt was near and dear to my English literature heart: storytelling (but digital).

In my time both in high school and university, the study and creation of stories and has taken up thousands of hours of my life. It is the backbone of my career choice. I think stories are a powerful medium for sharing, teaching, and persuading. Why not make it digital?

When I started the tutorial process I realized it looked much the same as traditional storytelling. You brainstorm, you research, you storyboard or plan, you get feedback, and you gather media (ok, this part looks a little different on the digital space I guess). At the end of the day, the only thing that can make storytelling better, is to add media.

The coolest part about digital storytelling is the voice-over feature. Being able to choose when is shown and overlay it with your own voice is a great tool to communicate with! The University of Guelph website recommends using voice over, images and video clips, and music and sound effects to make your story more effective. It also says that digital storytelling is best used for personal, historical, or instructional videos. They also recommend getting feedback on your story once you have made it and being specific with the questions you ask the feedback-givers.

So what

Digital storytelling looks like a super accessible way to share information and stories with people. Much like our conversation in class recently, educational videos are a great way to share information that can be viewed at any point the student might need it, holds a lot of creative power, and can share information in unique ways. I think, used well, this medium of sharing information can allow for a lot of creativity in educators and students.

One drawback to be aware of is that there is a barrier to entry for these sites. Some of them are clunky (I speak about that in my story with Powtoon), have ads, ask for personal information, or require a subscription. With this in mind, which platform you use might depend on the digital agility of your students, and, let’s be honest, of yourself. How much patience do you really have?

Now what?

The next step seemed obvious, I needed to make a digital story. So that is what I did.

The tutorial used Powtoon, so I opened it up and opened a free account (which quickly took my email and all the accompanying data). Does anyone really know where their data is going when they create a new account? Not to worry, this is for educational purposes.

When I opened Powtoon I took a big sigh…this was going to take a while. Much like Prezi, this website felt glitchy and my 10-year-old laptop fan immediately started preparing to take off to outer space. I pushed on.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make so I opened templates and after a couple minutes of browsing, I saw a template for a book review. I had just listened to a book called “The woman in the window” during my 7+ hours spent in the car commuting to class every week, so I thought, “YEP! Thats what I am gonna do!”

Now, this process was painfully slow and the product is less than presentable.

I am going to present it here anyways.

Lucky us.

First, I saw that the template really laid everything out for me! I thought that was awesome because I wasn’t sure how detailed I wanted to be for this. However, the template assumed I wanted about one minute of story, which was accurate, so I started filling in the blanks. It asked for genre, author, date and main plot points. I thought this was a great beginner level book review! At the end it asked for strengths and weaknesses of the books and an overall analysis of the book. This felt incredibly thorough and I quickly (ish) filled it all in.

I screen grabbed the first slide before I filled anything in (see above).

I also screen recorded the first half of the presentation edits which I have sped up and embedded here for your entertainment. Please note that I am not creating a masterpiece here and am mostly playing around with how to do the voice editing (which happened after I turned off the screen recording).

Once I had all my slides ready to go I realized I hated the music the template came with so I deleted it instantly. I wanted to create a voice over but that ended up being a terrible decision. I realized my browser was not capable of making the voice over (only Firefox and Chrome, neither of which I want on my laptop).

I decided to record the voice over on “Voice memos” right on my computer and upload it. I recorded the audio and went to upload it, feeling very good about myself as it only took me a couple minutes to do. Until I went to upload it and realized the file type was not supported.

This mess made no sense and honestly made me laugh, they were trying to RE record my audio with another mechanical voice…technology really is wild sometimes.

After messing around with it for a while I caved and downloaded Chrome and recorded the voice over (again) no the Powtoon site in the Chrome browser. Not ideal. I got it done though and ended up with a pretty spiffy voice over which I added to the slides with some low-key free music available on the site.

At this point I was feeling pretty good about myself, lined up the slides to the audio and hit export! Only to realize you cannot save the video to your device with the free version…

All that said and done, here is the link to the video I crafted this evening!

click the photo to see the book review!

Thoughts

I think this was a super fun way to share something I have traditionally been asked to do on a poster. The ability to add music and photos is really interesting and if I were to put more time into this I could have made it thriller themed with photos and creepy music. There are a lot of possibilities to personalize the story medium to what you are presenting.

On the other hand, I think there is a lot of drawback to using something like this. Honestly, this was quite frustrating to create. I had to download another browser, record the voice over multiple times (and it still does not sound super cool), and mess around with font sizes that did not automatically adjust to the template. This program was not user friendly. Admittedly, this is not the only program out there capable of doing this, but it is the one I used. It has made me wary of using these or assigning students to use them because it was so frustrating. The content of the video took me 45 seconds to come up with but the video itself took me an hour all said and done. The ratio of content to medium is really alarming.

Considering it is my first time doing this, there is room to assume it would not always be this bad. However, I would feel uncomfortable asking a student to do this for a number of reasons ranging from needing to sign up, the frustration of using the site, and the ratio of time to make the content and produce the video.

All that being said, I think digital storytelling is a really neat way to share information, I’m just not sure Ill be making another one anytime soon!

Weekly Reflection #5 Multimedia and Learning Design 

November 13, 2024 /
Photo by Prolific People Co: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-working-comfortably-with-laptop-and-coffee-29359858/

I spent quite a bit of time in homeschool and did about 50% of my undergrad during the pandemic. I found this lecture really encapsulated the importance of video and multimedia in my learning journey. I could not have completed my math without Kahn Academy, learned to love books without Goodreads, or make it through my literature degree without spark notes. I think each of this things have the capacity to hinder learning, but used well, the power to enhance it as well.

Summary (What)

Michael spoke about the creativity involved in using technology in the class from a design standpoint. The image below gives an idea of different types of technology in the classroom and what purpose they serve. Tools like this one are useful as you decide what technology to include in your classroom, when, and how. Even in Michael’s presentation when he used an image similar to this one, he cropped it in such a way that with every new slide we saw slightly more of the image. Not only is this a great way to demonstrate the things we can do with technology in the classroom, it gave us an example of how to limit distractions while we are planning for our lessons.

Constructive alignment is key when we are planning to use technology in our classes. Everything we do in class is taking us to some outcome, right down to the technology we use, the activities we incorporate, and the discussions we lead. As we plan and use technology we should reflect on how this impacts students. Is it distracting? Is it helpful? Is the technology getting in the way of the learning goal or aiding it? (Is it impeding students in an assignment or overstimulating them?)

After giving us examples of ways to use multimedia in our classrooms (imbedding videos and podcasts, using photos to explain) he explained the importance of using dual coding. This means both audio and visual methods of learning to help students remember information better.

I think this is a great way of keeping students engaged with the material. Whether the video is a YouTube embedded (to avoid the ads) or a video I made myself with a voice that is familiar to my students (to make it seem more authentic), video has a great place in the classroom.

  • It can be rewatched by students when they want to go back to remember how to do something or want something reexplained.
  • It can be watched when the students are most prepared to hear it (sometimes this is at home away from distracting peers or an overstimulating school environment).
  • Video can be more entertaining for some school subjects than teaching it in a classroom.
  • Video and multimedia can be heard and seen and so supports the dual coding process.

So what?

I spoke with my mom recently (a grade 2 teacher) who recommended I use visual timers in my classroom because it is a great way to remind students how long they have left on the task they are working on and how long they need to focus for. After a moment, she quickly said “Oh but be cautious about the timer noise and always make sure it is either silent or a calming sound!”. She was really adamant that a loud buzzer or anything else loud and shocking will overstimulate many kids and frustrate others. At best it will make them jump, at worst it will set students off and they might have a terrible rest of their day trying to self-regulate. I had never thought of this before and it is a great reminder that we need to be super aware of how the technology we use in our class might affect our students.

Watch the last few seconds of this video and you can see how this might be detrimental for many students. Not only is the background of the timer incredibly distracting (and somewhat dizzying), but the buzzer is abrupt and annoying.

This timer is calming with nice background music, nature sounds, and no timer sound at the end (the video simply ends). While this is relaxing it might also be distracting and the lack of a sound at the end might null the point of having a timer at all.

This last option is a simple black and white video with only minimal sounds at the end to indicate the last five seconds have arrived. Something like this could be a great option for silent reading time as it gently brings students back to the classroom and indicates the end of reading time.

The point of these three videos is to demonstrate my mom’s point that every decision counts in the classroom. A digital timer is helpful for displaying the time left in the activity for students, but things like noise, images, ads, and buzzer sounds can seriously detract from the positives.

This is another reason embedding videos is a really good idea. When you watch a video on YouTube the students are able to see video recommendations (which, if using your personal account, might feel a bit vulnerable), ad pop ups, and other distracting things. When a video is embedded it reduces the distractions while making it more convenient.

Now what?

https://www.powerschool.com/blog/samr-model-a-practical-guide-for-k-12-classroom-technology-integration/

This is am image like the one used in class and below is an example of how to present this in class in an organized and less distracting way. This took me 3 minutes to create the slides and record this video. It is not a difficult thing to do.

Things like videos in class are really important as well. I took a couple of really challenging history classes in my undergrad and John Green”s “Crash Course” is a great example of how I was able to use YouTube to understand what the heck was going on in these super boring 3-hour-long lectures. Like this crash course on US history (this is a long series but here he introduces what will be covered).

I think, moving forward, I will enjoy using technology in my class as I found it incredibly useful as a student. This lesson and the proceeding conversation with my mom has made me realize how much I need to pay attention to what might take away from the experience of using technology in my classroom and to keep in mind the state of the children I will be teaching.

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