Delicious updated

Here's updated "chopped" version. I put it into three separate vids, and dropped the last section about logging out and back in:

Delicious:

Delicious Account Setup (2:00) - What Delicious is, and how to set up your account

Adding Toolbar Buttons (1:21) - How to add Toolbar buttons to Firefox

Adding Sites to Delicious (2:35) - How to add and manage your favorite web sites

No More Transitions

I'm dropping transitions in an effort to keep the videos shorter. Redoing the Delicious vid showed me how they add up if you use them a lot, as I did when I made that video last semester. The transitions look nice, but to me it's just not worth making the video any longer than necessary.

"Chopping Up" Existing Videos

I'm in the process of "chopping up" my Delicious tutorial to use with the 7th grade German students this semester. This was one of my first videos I made and it was almost 8 minutes long (far too long IMO).

So rather than redoing it completely, I'm using "save as" in Camtasia to break it up into shorter sections, three in this case. I'll likely do the same to the Destiny Quest tutorial if possible.

EasyBib Book video

I realized a while back that I didn't do an example on EasyBib for a book source (believe it or not students did not use any books for the 8th grade research project in Science). I made one for a book source (clocked in at just under 2 minutes!). Here are all my EasyBib tutorials so far:

EasyBib:

EasyBib Introduction (2:11) - Find the site, register your account, logging in, etc.

EasyBib Magazines and Journals (5:02) - Examples of how to create citations for Magazine and Journal articles

EasyBib Newspaper (3:44) - Example of how to create a citation for a newspaper article

EasyBib Website (3:32) - Example of how to create a citation for a website using Autocite

EasyBib Book (1:55) - Example of how to create a citation for a book

EasyBib Create Your Bibliography (1:28) - Create a Word document of your bibliography using EasyBib

Working Between Home and School

Up until recently, I've been doing all these videos at home. Doing so much work outside the school day has been stressful.

Now I've got Camtasia on my work desktop (Camtasia allows their software to be loaded on more than one computer as long as you're not using them simultaneously). So I've fallen into a pattern of creating videos as time allows during the school day, then taking the files home on my flash drive and finishing and/or producing the video at home - adding music, tweaking a few things if needed, etc.

Then I bring the finished video back to school on my flash drive, upload it to our school's web server, and link it on all the relevant pages on my library website.

Cutting Out "Dead Time"

In a constant effort to keep my videos shorter, I recently tried cutting out dead time during the editing process using the "scissor tool" in Camtasia. I might find a section of the video where I'm typing something, or waiting for a webpage to load or whatever. If I'm not saying something during that time, I cut it out. These wasted seconds add up, and I say get 'em outta there!

More MyPyramid Videos

Two more for this project pending Darren's approval.

Entering Physical Activity:

• Entering Physical Activity (3:26) - How to find your activities in the database

• Entering Activity Duration (1:37) - Entering in your minutes for each activity

MyPyramid Health Lesson

Here's a project I'm collaborating on with our Health teacher, Darren Hartberg. I'm going to be presenting this lesson at WEMTA this spring. Here's the first few videos:

8th Grade Health - Dietary Analysis Report:

Your Account, Profile, and Navigation (2:39) - Create your account and profile, and learn how to navigate the MyPyramid site

Entering Food Items (2:21) - Directions on how to enter food items including frequently used foods

Portion Size and Quantity (2:42) - Entering quantities and number of servings

What's Better - One Long Vid or Several Short Vids?

The answer has become completely obvious now that I've done it both ways and watched the students interact with the instruction.  Several short vids are the way to go, it's not even a contest.

Aside from the fact that long videos can crash the browser here at school, the shorter vids (1-3 min.) just get the job done better.

My plan of having them take a longer video and "watch, pause, do" hasn't been the best way to go (I even zapped my original video on "How To Use Video Tutorials").  They don't always remember to pause the video and go do the task.  Sometimes they just keep watching, which is bad when it comes time to do something...they forget what they just watched if they take in too much instruction.

Also, even though you can chunk a longer vid into sections with the menu - something I still do even with the shorter vids - they don't always know where to pause the video and start doing something.  In the past I've even put in sections that say "now pause the video and do it" - sometimes they get it but not always.

Anyway, shorter is better, and they can still pause anytime, use the menu, rewatch a section, etc.  I've even dropped using transistions between clips and title slides in an effort to shorten things up.

Backup Plan?

Today our school web server was down for a while and no videos could be accessed. It was fixed promptly, but the issue remains - I should have a backup plan. I need to set up another place on the web to host these videos in case this happens again.