The Importance of Callouts

One thing I've seen students doing at times is zipping through a video without listening to it, mostly because they missed something the first time and just need to see a small section to know how to do something. In that case, having the visual clues of the callouts is very helpful. I've been doing a callout for most every important action that I show them. I believe that teaching using both verbal and visual at the same time is the best way to go.

More Techniques For Shorter Videos

Some recent things I'm doing to keep them as short as possible:

1. Title slides - I changed from the default 5 sec. to 2 sec.

2. Aggressively chopping out pauses and hesitations in my talking, breathing noises, etc. You can zoom in on the timeline and get very exact with the audio track.

Students are very sensitive to the length of the vids. Looking back at my monsterous 14 minute Destiny Tutorial, I'm amazed they even watched it. I may go back through some of the older vids and tweak them for less time.

Headset Model I'm Using

Here's a link to the headset I'm using to create the videos...and that the students are using to watch them:

Cyber Acoustics AC-851

They are working out well, I highly recommend them!

German Project Going Great!

The 7th grade German students are off to a great start with the Wiki project. The (short) videos proved to be very helpful. They got so much done in the first day - beyond my expectations. No problems or issues, kids that were behind from not doing the homework part (setting up a delicious account) were able to watch that vid and get to it without any extra instruction from me. The hard work of creating videos is paying off!

7th Grade German Project using Wikispaces

I have another project happening now, 7th grade German students are going to be making a wiki page and collaborating with another student in a different hour or day. More later, for now here's the link:

http://sites.google.com/a/oregonsd.net/oms-library/7th-grade-german-culture-project

Health Project Completed!

This is the project I'll be presenting at WEMTA this year. Darren and I will have a lot of details to share. Here's the completed page on my site with all the video links:

http://sites.google.com/a/oregonsd.net/oms-library/8th-Grade-Health---Dietary-Analysis-Report

How Big Are These Files?

I've been moving files to and from school a lot lately, and needed a bigger flash drive to hold everything.  Sometimes I need to change a video and it's great to have everything available all the time - project files, music and graphics, and finished flash-based videos.  Here's some sample sizes:

2:00 video (including folder of other "stuff" needed to post on the net) = 12 mb

Project folder of 2:00 video (all the files needed + the raw video clips) =  45 mb

The only thing you post to the server is the actual video and folder of flash files...so for this example I only need 12 mb of space for the 2:00 video.