Category Archives: instructional videos

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Drone Flying

  October 16, 2014

Hi Everyone, I bought a drone quadcopter last week. The one I bought was an Ares Ethos FPC. It comes with a camera that shoots in HD mounted on the bottom of it. I am pleased with it so far. I’m really happy I got the economic quadcopter first before I bought the really expensive one for several reasons. Mainly because the likelihood that you will crash a drone is 100%. It takes practice to land, how to maneuver in the air, how to not panic when it is not doing what you want. One of the scariest things is flying around people. No matter if you are really high in the air on down low, when you are not secure in your flying skills the awareness that you will get from the quadcopter dropping out of the sky out of control and hitting someone, or causing a car accident is VERY real. I suggest if you ever fly one to do it in an open field away from trees and people. I am attaching clips of me flying at grant park. It is really cool when you get the hang of it. Definitely go cheap first before you spend too much money and you have to pay more to fix it after a bad crash. Ameer

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Update on the US History Survey

  October 12, 2014 ,

Late last week, I observed a session, devoted to the topic of secession, of the hybrid U.S. history survey. It made me more than a little nostalgic for the classroom, in all its gritty and chaotic glory. And, it reminded me of the madness that is the one-semester U.S. history survey — the first week of October, and you have already reached the mid-point of the survey, the Civil War. Absolutely crazy, and a strong argument for GSU to adopt the standard version of the U.S. history survey, which is generally broken into 2 semester length classes. But that is another topic entirely. If my last post focused on the risk of the hybrid course, my experience watching the class served to remind me of the potential rewards of the hybrid structure. I have taught the survey several times, and the biggest problem I always face is the necessity of providing context. This is, in part, a coverage issue common to any classroom, but I think in history it is particularly important because as history teachers, the main skill we are trying to teach our students is to place events into historical contexts, to see things through the lens of the past. This is really only possible if you know enough about the past to create a context for it. For this reason, depth and breadth are super important to historical understanding. When I teach say Tom Paine or Harriet Jacobs, I am less interested in the kinds of questions … Continue reading

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You can lead a horse to water

  October 6, 2014 , ,

Taking risks in education is, well, risky. As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of my SIF assignments is to work on the hybrid U.S. history sections being offered at GSU this fall. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it takes full advantage of the D2L platform, it has it’s own, custom made (and free!) textbook, and it uses video segments, essentially little documentaries, to supplement instruction and to create a class that meets in-person once a week, and in a virtual classroom on the other. The film segments, in combination with reading from both the textbook and from primary sources, become the material on which Thursday class is based. So, the classroom is also flipped, meaning that it replaces time often spent in lecturing for time spent on discussion or other types of activities that usually get little time in survey courses. As great as this sounds, there is a little bug in the system so far – very few students are watching the video. Because they are accessed through D2L, the number of students accessing each video can be tracked, and the results to date have been discouraging. This is frustrating – not only because of the many hours that go into producing each video segment but also because the videos are an attempt to engage learners who are supposedly visual, and who will tell you that they don’t keep up with reading because of the medium, not because they are averse to … Continue reading

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Getting more from images in the classroom

  October 2, 2014 ,

As I mentioned last week, one of my main tasks as a SIF fellow is to help generate video segments, essentially small documentaries, for GSU’s hybrid U.S. History survey course. Over the last week, I have been learning Adobe Premier Pro, so that I can transform a-roll footage of historians talking with each other about important historic events and phenomena into more engaging film. One of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been leaning the mechanics of video editing is how to maximize the pedagogical value of the films we are making. There is a kind of tension, hopefully a creative one over the long term, between the teacher in me (I have taught non-hybrid versions of the course several times), who thinks above all in terms of exposing students to important material, and to the complexity of historical circumstance, and the novice film-maker who is under the understandable mandate of producing a video that students will actually watch. All of the complexities of the discussion, which is a kind of wonderful dialectical back and forth between two historians trying to make sense of a complicated era, are lost if the audience for the film isn’t listening while watching. So, Ameer and I have been grappling with this question of how to use video as an engagement point, not a distraction, to produce videos that are as meaty as the lectures they are intended to replace, but hopefully will hold the attention of students in a … Continue reading

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Instructional Videos and Why to Learn How to Create Them

  September 25, 2014 ,

Whenever I need to figure out how to do something, I tend first to look up a short instruction video on YouTube—say, fixing a vacuum cleaner or learning how to use a particular feature of a software.  In three or four minutes, I’m moved through a video instruction that shows the interface of the software as a voice moves me through the clicks or I watch a film of someone pulling apart a vacuum to reveal how the dang weird-o-belt gets reattached.  It’s a good way to learn stuff, especially when you don’t want to read the entire manual. No wonder that lots of teachers have been using various software programs to create short videos to teach students or help them review material on their own.  Of course, more folks could take up this approach—refine it and re-imagine it to solve further pedagogical problems. In this post, I want to mention a new program I’ve just learned about, Camtasia, and an app I’ve used, Explain Everything, that is now available for Windows, as well as Mac (about $5).  (There are many other products; but these two are the ones I’ve worked with.)  So far I’m a novice at creating these videos, but I am a fervent convert in their utility, and even elegance, in providing students with learning benefits. I’ve created some very rudimentary Explain Everything videos using an iPad, and have recently taken two workshops in which I learned the basics of Camtasia.  Both these programs allow a teacher … Continue reading