My Educational Diatribe

PowerPoint for use in chemistry lectures
I found this little article in the most recent edition of Using Computers in Chemical Education. It describes the wonderful uses of PowerPoint in chemistry lectures in terms of impact, usefulness and educational value. I read over it pretty quick and found some way cool stuff.

So a long time ago I found a program called Camtasia which allows you to ‘record’ what is on your computer screen. A window, a defined area, or even the entire screen. You can lay down an audio track at the same time if you wish. Its pretty neat because you can film yourself doing something on the computer (editing a excel file, doing a calculation, etc.) complete with an audio track. At the time I first saw it, it was sort of clumsy and people could only watch the film if they had the Techsmith codec or you did 153223 special setting changes to get it to work on another video playback tool.
Well, it has now been three years and they are on version 3.0, and it now has much cooler effects. It is now very easy to edit the file as well as export it into multiple file formats (quicktime, window media, AVI, even SWF files) What is even cooler is when you set it up it plants itself right into PowerPoint (my lecture tool of choice) and you can record straight out of that without running both programs at once (PowerPoint and Camtasia)
So I got to thinking, why not record my lectures? I could wear a wireless microphone and record the entire lecture, then make the file available to students who chose to go back and ‘review’ the material again later. Lets face it, they only hear a portion of what I say because they are frantically writing stuff down. If they watch (and listen) to the film later, they will already have the lecture notes in their notebooks. They can follow along with the slides (so they know where they are) but they can focus on the words I am saying at the same time. They can go back and listen a second or third time as well.
I thought some more… The files sizes are going to huge if I leave them as 55 min videos. I could break them up into specific small 10-15 min topics. For example, one could be just on the atomic radius periodic trend (about 10 minutes long) That way if the student wants to review just that section, they can.
Yet more thinking…. Recording the actual lecture is probably not the best idea. There is a lot of dead air in there, with me pausing to give students time to write down the notes, me giving them time to confer with their neighbors about a question, me going back and forth with material, etc. Why not just record the portion where I am actually talking. I could go in an edit the lecture recording to pare it down, but ick, that’s too much work. Why not just sit down and talk continuously the words that I will say in lecture. Remove the dead air time (student scribbling/working), time for questions posed, discussed and answered, and you would be left with maybe 20-25 minutes of stuff. Nice and condensed in bite size pieces that can be repeated over and over again by the student as a review. Since it would be a different session, I might explain the same concept in a slightly different way, which is a good thing.
Still more… The resolution is too low to effectively take notes from (I want to cut down on students skipping class) by what I could do is make the audio feed available before lecture (a podcast?) I require my students now to go and read the textbook (portions of it) before I cover the material in lecture and they turn in a set of simple questions dealing with the assignment. I could instead require them to listen to an audio clip and answer similar questions.
Yup, more… I currently am posting these screencasts as flash files. Flash is a cool program that interactivity can be built in. With the right training, these could be made interactive with the students. Meaning, you could ask them a question and if they get it right, it moves on. If they get it wrong, it goes back and reviews some more.
Not done yet… PowerPoint is an effective tool, but for long drawn out problems, it is tough to setup. It might take me an hour to write one slide that involves a complex calculation. It takes an hour because of the tool. If I were doing by hand, it would take 5-10 minutes. I don’t mind doing the PowerPoint version of complex problems for lectures, because I know I will re-use them. What happens if a student wants one more example? What if they need me to explain how to do one of the end-of-chapter problems? Well, I don’t want to make a PowerPoint slide calculation for each one. Enter a nice cheap webcam. I film the piece of paper I am writing on and lay down the audio commentary, explaining what I am doing as I am doing it. I save that, post it, and then ANYONE who wants that explanation has it. I solve the problem once, and then I can slowly build a database of solved problems.
So here is a page with few examples of my ‘office’ lectures http://docott.com/files.141/screencasts/
Here is a great presentation on how to use podcasting, blogs, and screencasting to augment lectures from Professor J.C. Bradley at Drexel University
http://tinyurl.com/cqyjn
I would recommend viewing this screencast to anyone who is thinking about incorporating these technologies into their classroom.