Category Archives: pedagogy

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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

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Gamification Part 2: How can it be used to promote education?

  September 22, 2014

Hey Everyone! This week has flown by! We’re definitely making some headway at CURVE with one of our interactive environment projects–which I plan on posting more details about in my post next week. It’s pretty exciting and involves a tremendous amount of data that’s available–like maps showing the widths of sidewalks, streets, and building facades–as well as some interior measurements on the old Eighty-One Theatre. It’s grave lies beneath our very own Classroom South. For this week I just wanted to wax poetic on some potential applications on gamification in education and how to use it to promote projects. It’s definitely easier to talk about gamification in the context of video games–the whole point to a video game is creating a gamified experience, and anything else is there to support that function–whether it’s sound, visuals, narrative, or novel controls. Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer who started with a game, Braid, that was wildly successful for an independent release. His immediate critical and public acclaim allowed him to start speaking publicly about the video game industry and its inherent problems–some ethical. Here’s a video below–I welcome you to watch the entire presentation, but he only begins discussing the process of gamification starting around 50:00. The point Blow makes about modern game design–especially for social games, like Farmville–is that people are being ‘tricked’ into playing simplistic games. The term ‘tricked’ has a negative connotation, but it’s applicable. In the case of gamifying a process of data mining that people … Continue reading

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Interactive Media + The Classroom

  September 22, 2014

We all know the advancement technology has made in the educational field–we all are a part of it!–and the potential it has to revolutionize the traditional method of “learning”. Interactive media is category of mediums set to give some power over to the students. Interactive media consists of a plethora of different ideas and concepts. It can be something as simple as creating a Powerpoint with audio/comments asking questions and reinforcing main ideas and handing it over to a student to go through it with the class; or, it could be something more complex such as a 3D animation of the human body’s internal organs and the affect diseases have on it. This new technology-based style of teaching has expanded over the years. KhanAcademy is one such example of it. They create free, instructional videos for multiple subjects, and they have now grown to the point where they are the primary focal point of classrooms in some schools. Not only can interactive media such as video lectures/teachings help educate and tutor students here, but it also brings education to places that do not have open access to proper schools or teachers. There are many villages in Africa that have charity-sponsored computers and schools, but often times the teachers there are not very educated themselves. In some of these villages, KhanAcademy replaces traditional teaching and allows children and adults to learn about whatever they want–for free. Even here in the United States, there are some classrooms that primarily use KhanAcademy’s instructional … Continue reading

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The Hoccleve Archive and the Sudden Currency of Old-Fashioned Skills

  September 17, 2014 ,

I haven’t written yet about what is probably my personal favorite of the SIF projects, an ambitious digital humanities project called the Hoccleve Archive, which is attempt to create a digital variorum edition of Thomas Hoccleve’s early 15th century poem, the Regiment of Princes. One aspect of this poem is the complex computing and scholarly challenge of collating, displaying and digitally ‘marking-up’ a 5500 line poem which exists in 43 different manuscript versions. MSS. Dugdale 45, Hoccleve’s Regiment Bodleian Library, Oxford Another Manuscript version of Hoccleve’s Regiment In addition to these manuscripts, the Hoccleve Archive project hopes to conserve and make accessible a huge amount of material gathered in the 1980’s and 1990’s for what turned out to be a (very productive!) failure to produce a printed variorum edition of the Regiment. This extra material, which gives the Hoccleve Archive huge head start, includes over 6000 handwritten collation sheets, and nearly 150 text-based computer files containing an archaic, but still legible orthographic and lexical mark-up of Hoccleve’s holograph manuscripts. Hoccleve Archive Collation Folders Using these materials, however, is far from straightforward. The mark-up of the new, all digital archive will be done XML/TEI (a specialized tag set for manuscripts and literary documents), whereas the older mark-up was done in a customized language, which the computing end of our team (Ram, Sruthi, Rushitha), are translating into XML/TEI. Figuring out how to use the handwritten collation sheets, which have been scanned, but will also need considerable work to convert into digital form, … Continue reading

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Digital Pedagogy Meetup 1.0

  September 14, 2014

This Monday (9/8) was the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the school year. It was held at Manuel’s Tavern in the back room (though it’s really not as clandestine as it sounds), and is part of a larger Atlanta studies community now called “Atlanta Connected Learning.” Nirmal speaks about Mahana – a part of Georgia Tech’s first year experience. Spearheaded by innovative faculty from several Georgia schools in the Atlanta area, including but not limited to GSU, SPSU, Agnes Scott, and GATech, Atlanta Connected Learning is going to be an umbrella community that will eventually house several different educational and innovative meet ups designed to encourage the kind of innovation that is already happening in this community, but gather more followers and minds to take on all the projects to be tackled in the Georgia school systems. Digital Pedagogy Meetups will continue to feature 2 sets of speakers who will talk, in a casual setting, about the projects they are working on to promote lifelong learning and a journey into the future of pedagogy. Check out atlcl.org  for more developments, as the site will be developing and changing a lot over the coming semester. Get on board, if you aren’t already. Valerie Robin