J. Simon van der Walt here from music, guesting on the blog. I thought I'd share a couple of teaching and learning things I've been doing on the web recently.
First up is making and sharing video online, mainly to demonstrate technical points with using music software. My most succesful posting so far is this demonstration of how to connect to the server using one of the college iMacs. The content was made by doing static screenshots, writing out what I wanted to say and recording it as audio, and then putting the whole lot together in a video editing package. The whole thing maybe took 45 minutes to produce, which is a fair investment in time; on the other hand, before this I was quite possibly spending about that amount of time every week dealing with students who couldn't figure out or remember how to do this, so probably time well spent.
I originally shared this on YouTube, but it was getting mixed up with various private postings of mine. My new strategy is to use several different accounts for the various online tools I'm using, so that I can separate my Stevenson College material from my RSAMD material from my personal work.
My new fave tool for this kind of work is ScreenToaster, as in this demonstration of drum notation in Sibelius for my RSAMD students. I'm finding this very quick and easy to use, this can't have taken more than fifteen minutes to do, no other software tools required, it's all on the web and works mac or PC.
What is Web 2.0 anyway? Three key points for me I guess are tools anyone can use without installing software, user generated content, and social features, and its the latter which I'm finding it hard to use effectively in teaching. Quite a while back I started collecting together all of the links I wanted my students to explore on my delicious page, with keywords to match the link to the relevant class. If this had really taken off the students might have started using delicious, bookmarking stuff themselves and sharing it with me... but it didn't. None of them showed much interest, although it does remain a useful place for me to keep my teaching links handy.
The other failed experiment was the wiki which I started to set up as a kind of instruction manual for the music hardware and software we use. There is some nice content here, but again, the real trick would have been to get some of the keener students to maintain the wiki themselves.
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2 comments:
Great stuff there Simon. Thanks for the post. We’ll all be picking your brains now.
You touch on some points we've been discussing at various meetings.
One of the issues that you raise relates to time. Yes, there is some time investment in setting things up initially. However, this can save time in the long run. This has been my experience as well. If students miss classes, for example, I can refer them to the online material and lesson journals. Students, as we know, can be in and out a lot (the “buffet” approach to learning). There's not much I can do about that. But my online material minimises the disruption to everyone involved in that class's learning process (me, the “buffet” student, and the regular attenders)
How successful have you been in getting students to produce material or engage in some form of online dialogue?
I'm really impressed Simon . Again, like Jerry, it would seem that the investment at beginning pays off by not have to repeat everything . How we get students to engage is a very different matter. I know that when I was doing an on-line course last year, it was the compulsory nature of contributions on-line that forced me to get my head around the technology and post up my pointd for discussion. What I did notice was that it took me along time to finally publish comment, worrying that it wasn't really valid, interesting or academic enough . I wouldn't have been so hesitant in class :)
Although we are not really looking at on-line learning here, I wonder if there is some fear from students (and staff) about committing something to a public forum which is fairly permanent.
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