First Attempts at Making a Video using ExplainEverything

I have this vision of being able to use videos to help my students learn. But first I need to practice and become quicker at this.

I have heard a lot of people recommend ExplainEverything, so I gave it a go. My first attempt is not for public consumption, took my hours and I didn't think it looked very professional. Then I searched for some tutorials. Perhaps I should have done this first. http://www.morriscooke.com/?p=134

I learned that you can upload a presentation and each slide in the presentation will be a different slide in the ExplainEverything movie. So I decided that I would create a presentation and use ExplainEverything to talk over the top. It seemed (and it is) much easier to do this in ExplainEverything than in iMoive.

I wanted to make the film look slightly interesting, so I took inspiration from Jamie Clark: jamieleeclark85.wordpress.com/ The resources he makes always look great and I saw no reason why I couldn't use keynote to create attractive slides and make the short film more interesting to the young people who will use it.

By far the worst thing about making a video is doing the voice over. I strong recommend writing a script and reading through it. Even then I make mistakes and change my mind when reading it. I have found the experience of voicing a video very interesting. I don't find it easy to succinctly describe physics phenomena, so I imagine that I babble on in class. Creating the video means that I need to use as few words as possible and get to the main points. Hopefully this makes it clearer what students need to know.

If you watch the video you will see black stripes down the slide. In future I need to realise that I must make the background presentations with 'wide screen'. Which is a possible selection in Keynote. This should eliminate the issue.

I wish that in the video below I had used more features of ExplainEverything to actually move the hand around. (I think it can do this). But I will continue to play and make more resources. Hopefully it will help to engage my students.

At the moment I plan to only make instructional videos for GCSE, as I will teach Key Stage 3 with a more discovery approach and I don't want them to always be told the answer. Plus I have online textbooks and activities bought from OUP for them. A-level is changing in September 2015, so I am going to leave that for now. I hope to make very short videos for GCSE so that they will be useable in the new specifications even if content is shuffled about within the modules.

I am on holiday at the moment and I am concerned whether I will be able to keep up the creative juices when I get back to school, but as twitter colleagues have suggested, students will be able to make the videos too! I look forward to that.

Bring Your Own Device

We are planning to launch a bring your own device scheme at school. I work at an independent school so I suppose it s easier to insist on students brining a tablet to lessons.

I can foresee issues where students will not bring their device if we are not encouraging them to use them. But how?

1) If they get the kindle reader they will be able to annotate PDFs. This means I can ask key stage 4 students to download the specification and make notes on each section as to what they understand and things they will need to recap when they revise.

2) Socrative - if all students have devices then it should be simple to use them to complete quizzes using socrative. What I like about this is that an app isn't necessary.

3) Padlet - I like the idea of working collaboratively. Padlet will allow students to give answers/comments on the wall and see those of others.

4) Evernote is a free app, allowing notebooks to be shared and it works cross platform. It is a possible way to share my presentations with students and also a way for them to collate their work on their tablet.

5) Calendars and reminders - I would hope that most tablets come with these applications and they are a good replacement for the paper planners students carry.

6) Social bookmarking - again to help students stay organised. Through bit.ly, delicious and pinterest.

I hope that these ideas are simple enough to be accessible to all students and possible to use regularly.


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Using personal mobile devices in the classroom

I work in a school where there are no rules other than "respect each other, respect yourself and respect the environment". Covers most things, but nothing is clear cut, "respect" basically means that each teacher can interpret things in their own way and the consistency isn't great. However, we have fantastic students who want to learn and most of them thrive in an environment where independence is allowed to flourish.

I don't encourage my students to use their mobile devices in lessons for their learning. However, I know staff who do in my school and in other schools. I think the phrase is "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

My partner used mobile devices to help personalise lessons and engage students. He helps them to show their independent learning skills by using their mobiles or choosing to use a textbook to find something out.

Alessio Bernardelli has shown me socrative, an online quiz room where you set the questions and the students can use their own devices to answer the questions and ultimately get a picture of how the group is doing. This type of interaction is the power of mobile technology to me.

I visited my new school in the Easter holidays and was nicely surprised by their positive attitude to ICT. Starting in September post-16 students will have the opportunity to use the school computers virtually on their smart phones, net books, tablets or computers. I am massively impressed by this. I am aware the technology has been around for a while, but I haven't heard of it being implemented in a school before.

Whether this will mean that students are able to use mobile devices in their lessons, I am not sure. At the moment the school rules are such that students are not allowed mobiles during the school day. However, I have seen them out in a class where students were videoing their dissection. So I hope there is a level of discretion.

I think that "bring your own device" is how education will move. Bringing a personal device will becomes as common as bringing a pen to lessons. It will mean teachers and schools will have to become more imaginative on how we use the devices as making a PowerPoint won't become as easy, it will also be necessary to have networks that can cope with the hundreds of devices.

In terms of teaching and learning, teachers will have to develop their ability to support students' research skills. And they will have to consider carefully whe technology can support instead of hinder learning.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Bristol