Pedagogy First!

While travelling, I'm using an iPod Touch as my mobile computing device. The small screen and 'Thumb typing' argue for short and sweet posts ; )

Before creating new video content, I will typically search YouTube to see what is available and get ideas. Vimeo is another good resource. Podcasts were especially helpful to make video/audio accessible when dealing with slow modem connections. Like RSS it would let you know when something new was available - and it would download that file for you automatically (e.g. In the middle of the night) so that it would later 'be there for you' in the morning. It also provides a structure to the presentations (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). With a CMS to organize, streaming video to make it easier to view video on a slower connection, I haven't used podcasting so much when teaching. Though enjoy podcasting to collect stories from good resources, already downloaded, and ready to port over to the iPod touch for later listening/watching.

Thoughts on video and podcasts

YouTube

YouTube has been a boon for historians. Not only are there clips from films and documentaries, but quite a bit of primary footage has been put online.

I created some playlists (the one for history seems to have this url), and then made a channel, but didn't really understand what that means. There are so many sites where there's a difference between what you see when you're logged in and what you see when you just get to the page. Youtube is especially strange in this regard.

I haven't used YouTube much for my own stuff. The only one I have posted is this screencast about grading essays in Moodle:

Blip.tv

Some people recommended blip.tv, so I posted my Guide to Historical Thinking there just to try it. It's kind of cool because it has a choice of players for embedding:

I posted one of our Getting Started Teaching Online videos there, but then switched to Vimeo.

Podcasts

I listen to a number of podcasts on educational technology:

http://edtechposse.ca/ -- The EdTech Posse out of western Canada made up of leading educational technology profs and researchers

http://edtechtalk.com/WomenofWeb2.0 -- Women of Web 3.0 is a group of educators who host a podcast with great guests about using educational technology in class

This last is part of EdTech Talk which has many other podcasts and conversations also.

I haven't gotten into making podcasts, though I know some history profs do. They essentially create a little radio show for students to get through iTunes. Perhaps I could do this someday, but I think I'd rather head toward video.

My current thoughts on instructor-created video I love the idea of talking head video embedded into a screen that shows a slideshow. I just saw a good lecture on facilitation that was "webcas" using something called MediaSite that shows the speaker and the slides at the same time. I think if we are going to do presentation, we should use something like this, or at least something like Adobe Connect that embeds our talking head.

Week 12 - Podcasts - Audio and Video - Channels and Comics

I have heard of people recording podcasts as audio (e.g., radio shows), but I have also read that a podcast could mean video.  As I got started this week, I wanted to truly understand why the word "podcast" was used to describe certain digital media files.  I went to Wikipedia's "podcast" entry and found that, according to Wikipedia, part of the reason a podcast is a podcast is because of how it is accessed through the internet.  Podcasts can be audio or video.  I then decided that I wanted to explore both for this blog post.

I have been to YouTube before, so I went to Vimeo because this is the site that the Program for Online Teaching has used for posting videos from the mini conferences and the such.  I have the Program for Online Teaching Vimeo channel on my RSS feed reader, in fact.  I watched a few videos, including short films and other videos that are not on the POT channel, and found that many of them were well-produced.  I enjoyed how the description of the video provided by the person who posts the video appears in large text under the video window in a gray font.  It was appealing to my eye.

My next stop was revisiting a podcast that is audio, not video.  I listened to the podcast called Learning Through Comic Books by Beth Fertig (through WNYC) last semester.  I was excited to revisit this audio podcast.  I had originally found it when I was doing research as a preschool teacher for a project that had to do with comics and heroes.  Since this has to do with a way to teach children literacy that is not necessarily the most common method, I thought that it would fit well in Pedagogy First!, too.

Overall, I am glad that this week gave me an opportunity to visit Vimeo and revisit the idea of audio podcasts as learning tools.  The nice thing about the audio podcast I found is that it also contains the transcript so a student could read along.  Soon I might teach a course in which this podcast could fit in terms of content.  If I do, I might have students explore this audio podcast in some way.

Learning

lecture 1 practice

Barbara McPherson's Podcast

Learning to Podcast