School has started. 

On both sides of the fence - teacher and pupil share an the initial nervousness as the two parties start to introduce each other, set ground rules and begin the journey of learning and teaching. In our world of 2010, who is the learner and who is the teacher sometimes blurs and it takes a good class team to work together harmoniously with that mixed metaphor of students teaching learning teachers and vice versa.

This posting provides an example in a blog narrative format of something I had to do recently. So recently that I am still doing it...

But first, I will continue building a link between story telling, blogs and eLearning...

Extend that team learning and teaching concept to eLearning and a whole world of possibilities open up where the eLearning "thing" can either be like a television show where we sit dumbly and soak in the message from the machine or it can be interactive where the eLearning guides the group to a point where the class team is generating its own knowledge, learning and output.

The type of eLearning content and delivery type selected is up to the teacher in conjunction with the curriculum requirements and I suspect consultation with peers. Story Based Design can be used to take existing asynchronous components and combine them into a synchronous delivery around a story based design approach.

This blog is asynchronous in that if you subscribe, an email appears in your intray from me and you are directed to the website. This blog has the single purpose of storing and sharing knowledge of the journey we are taking to implement eLearning using tools like Adobe Connect, SharePoint, Moodle and the myriad of authoring tools that make up the mix of content creation. There are also the existing repositories of content like scootle that are exposed to those who may not be aware of their existence.

It is challenging to make a story about technical aspects of the tools used in eLearning interesting, but it is important to record the experience in a way it can be searched again and found if a similar problem occurs.

This story is about the use of a tool called Camtasia from Techsmith. As with all the products I ever write about, I can't officially endorse them, but hopefully I am not silly enough to use and write about products I think are not useful.

Using multimedia tools to capture and deliver just in time training.

The purpose of this story is to demonstrate some things you can consider when creating screen capture video software product demonstrations.

Once upon a time... We won't start with that...

Student records administration is extremely important. All the way from making sure that the correct student details are captured at enrolment through to ensuring that correct grades and attendance data are stored in our systems. Many would argue that student administration is the lifeblood of the school and education administration system.

So when a new system was rolled out last year that simplified the searching for student enrolment information and linked the information to the existing databases, it was extremely important that those folks who needed to be able to use the system for creating new enrolments and ensuring that there were no duplicate records.

The idea was to create a series of small movies that administrators could look at to see how to use the system. These would support the written fact sheets that were created to support the system.

The fact sheets formed the basis for the story board which is what I use as a prompt to record the steps. Having a script means you don't have to be ad hoc in your narration and do heaps of editing.

Here is an example of a Camtasia presentation I prepared for our corporate leadership group using Camtasia to talk a little about ... wait for it... how to use Camtasia. I cover some of the things to think about before recording.

http://ourcourses.ntschools.net/file.php/98/Cam1/elearning.html

Note:

If you get a login screen, click on the login as guest button. If my smiling face doesn't appear, you will need to click on the following link http://ourcourses.ntschools.net/course/view.php?id=98 and click on the link Introduction to creating eLearning with Camtasia

So if you work through the presentation (which asynchronous because it isn't live) it shows that we can re-purpose content intended for another audience into our story.

Speaking of our story, we wanted to create a series of movies demonstrating a software release. Our deadlines were to coincide with the start of school. The challenge was that some of the screens we wanted to record were not operational and we couldn't demonstrate them.

 In this case we identified that the test environment had the screens we wanted to demonstrate and armed with the fact sheets to use as our script and with a subject matter expert looking on, we used Camtasia to record the sequences required for searching and downloading student data.

I thought that it would be good to have a parent arrive at a front counter with a student and have someone from our fictitious school handle the enrolment transaction. How to do that? We have an iPod nano (and a flipcam) but we chose the nano - asked three of our ladies from the team to play the part in this 1 minute scene setting video which would have the parent and student enter the front office, ask to enrol, the front office staff member asks for student's name, checks the system, finds the student and completes the enrolment form for signature by the parent. We then insert those videos into the correct location on the timeline and we have a story that is setting the context for using the software and demonstrating how to use it.

So we can weave a little acting in among our "screen grabs" and although the participants probably cringe every time they see the movie, it has told a story and helped a lot of people, especially in remote locations by bringing some knowledge via a visual story into their office and their life.

This blog entry has taken that story of a real life event - the creation of a training video about using a student administration system, explained it and hopefully created a link between what you would like to do and what we have done.

A story has a beginning, middle and end. It also has a moral or a purpose. Our training material is the same. We can scaffold, be inclusive, practise constructivism but in the end telling with purpose through story will get the job done.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on February 4, 2010 at 8:26 AM and has received 354 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.