Tuesday, September 17, 2013

E-LEARNING ACTIVITY ONE

E-learning activity one:

Screencast one - Setting-up a Wix e-portfolio through eMIT

Above is the link to the first screencast that was developed to support students to set-up and initially use their individual ePortfolios. The focus of this screencast is around providing students with context specific, flexible, continuously available, easily accessible support system personalised to their specific needs.

To this end the screencast begins with students being invited to access their own course eMIT (blackboard) site. They are then directed to a specific tab and then a specific folder, that will take then to the ‘Wix web builder’ link that has been imbedded into their course tools. It was decided to imbed the link into eMIT, as some students found it difficult to find the ‘Wix web builder’ link on the internet. It is hoped that this context specific approach will help to alleviate the initial frustration and stress expressed by some students.

The students are then shown how to access templates that are relevant to the focus of the course and encouraged to ‘have a play’. According to Oehrli, Piacentine, Peters & Nanamaker (2011) to be effective screencasts need to be short, and they argue that when considering illustrating basic concepts two short videos back to back can be more effective than one long video. With this in mind I decided to finish this first screencast at the ‘have a play’ stage, so that students could have time to get their mind around what the site looks like and how it works.

Student access to the screencast link was provided through the course eMIT site. As it is envisaged that the screencasts will be used by students to support/extend the learning in the classroom, the course lecturer loaded the link after she had shown the students the ‘how to steps and discussion’ in class. Once students have access to the link they are able to watch it many times, and they are able to stop and start the screencast when needed, thus making it flexible, continuously available and easily accessible.

Don’t forget that I value your feedback and recommendations for improvement:

·         What do you feel works well in this screencast?

·         What did you find challenging in this screencast?

·         What suggestions to you have for improvement/extension of this screencast?

 

Reference:

Oehrli, J; Piacentine, J; Peters, A and Nanamaker, B. (2011). Do Screencasts Really Work?  Assessing Student Learning through Instructional Screencasts. Retrieved July 26th 2013 from          http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/national/2011/papers/do_screencasts_work.pdf

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