Screencasting is an integral part of the inverted classroom movement, and you can find screencasting even among courses that aren’t truly flipped. Using cheap, accessible tools for making and sharing video to clear out time for more student-active work during class make screencasting very appealing. But does it work? Do screencasts actually help students learn?
We have lots of anecdotal evidence that suggests it does, but it turns out there are actually data as well that point in this direction. I’ve been reading an article by Katie Green, Tershia Pinder-Grover, and Joanna Mirecki Millunchick (of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan) from the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education in which they studied 262 students enrolled in an engineering survey course that was augmented with screencasts. Here’s the PDF. This paper is full of interesting…
I wasn’t sure how students in the course would respond to the inverted classroom structure. On the one hand, by setting the course up so that students were getting time and support on the hardest tasks in the course and optimizing the cognitive load outside of class, this was going to make a problematic course very doable for students. On the other hand, students might be so wed to the traditional classroom setup that no amount of logic was going to prevail, and it would end up like my inverted MATLAB class did where a
Sorry for the absence, but things have been busy around here as we step fully into the new semester. The big experiment this term is with my flipped introduction to proofs class. As I wrote last time, I was pretty nervous going into the semester about the course. But things seem to be working really well so far. I don’t want to jinx the experience by saying so, but so far, nobody in either of my two sections of the course has given any indication that the flipped model isn’t working for them. In fact, I gave a survey in the first week of class that included an item soliticing their concerns or questions about the flipped model, and here’s a sample of the responses:
I think the “flipped” structure will be better for a lot of the students and end with success from more students than normal.
I think this sounds really great. The idea of actually working on problems in class …
At some point around the beginning of February 2012, David Coffey — a co-worker of mine in the math department at Grand Valley State University and my faculty mentor during my first year — mentioned something to me in our weekly mentoring meetings. We were talking about screencasting and the flipped classroom concept, and the conversation got around to Khan Academy. Being a screencaster and flipped classroom person myself, we’d talked about making screencasts more pedagogically sound many times in the past.
That particular day, Dave mentioned this idea about projecting a Khan Academy video onto the screen in a classroom and having three of us sit in front of it, offering snarky critiques — but with a serious mathematical and pedagogical focus — in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I told him to sign me up to help, but I got too busy to stay in the loop with it.
I took a two-week blogging hiatus while final exams week, and the week before, played themselves out. Now that those fun two weeks are over, it’s time to start focusing on what’s next. Some of those things you’ll read about here on the blog, starting with the most immediate item: my spring Calculus 2 class that starts on Monday.
Terminology note: At GVSU and other Michigan schools, the semester that runs from January through April is called “Winter” semester. The period in between Winter and Fall is split into two six-week terms, the first being “Spring” (May-mid June) and the second “Summer” (mid June-July). It’s quite accurate to the climate here.
Anyway, my Calculus 2 class runs in that 6-week Spring term. If you know anything about Calculus 2, and you have a sense of just how long, or short, a 6-week period is, the first thing you’ll realize is that this is a lot of content…
Alasdair McAndrew takes a detailed look at alternatives to MATLAB, including Octave, Scilab, and Freemat. Sadly, his preferred alternative isn’t 100% OS X friendly, but that’s not his fault.
On Slashdot, a report that Google is shuttering 10 of its projects. Most of these are marginal at best, with the notable exception of Google Notebooks, which does seem to get used by a nontrivial number of people.
Last week, I had the chance to attend ScreencastCamp, a weekend event put on by Techsmith, Inc. just down M-6 in Okemos, Michigan. What a great experience! Techsmith develops Camtasia, my go-to software for all screencasting needs, as well as several other great products like Jing and SnagIt. I’ve been a fan of their products for a long time, and it was great to spend time getting to know the people behind them.
ScreencastCamp was an unconference, where there is no set agenda beforehand. Participants just come with an idea of what they want to learn, and then either put on a session or request one. There were about 40 of us participating, mostly from education but with a healthy contingent from the corporate (training) world as well. Amazingly, although this is a relatively small number of participants, all the session slots for Saturday and Sunday filled up almost immediately as people…
In this post, the fifth in a series of posts on how I make screencasts, I’m going to focus on what I call the “whiteboard” screencast. This is a screencast where I am demoing some sort of concept or calculation by writing things down, rather than clicking through a Keynote presentation or typing something on the screen. It’s intended to mimic the live presentation of content on a whiteboard, hence my name for it.
Of course the most well-known examples of “whiteboard” screencasts are the videos at Khan Academy. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen a Khan Academy video before, here’s one:
I do whiteboard screencasts fairly often. I use them sometimes for presenting hand calculations for students to watch and work through before class, and sometimes (probably more frequently) I use them to create additional examples for things I’ve covered in class. This is a really powerful use…
Now that school’s out, I’m going to pick up where I left off (two months ago!) in my series on how I make screencasts. So far I’ve made three posts in this series. In the first post we talked about what a screencast is, exactly, and why anybody would want to make one. In the second post, we saw how the elements of careful planning make screencasting a successful experience. And in the most recent post, we took a look at using Keynote (or PowerPoint) to create a lecture-capture screencast.
Before I talk about the other kinds of screencasts I make, I’m going to take this post to describe how I use my go-to tool for screencasting: Camtasia for Mac, specifically how I use it to make lecture capture videos when I’m not using Keynote. (Full disclosure: I was on the beta-testing team for Camtasia for Mac and got a free license for the software for my efforts. But I can definitely say that I’d …
I’ve just finished up the spring semester, and with it the second iteration of the inverted classroom MATLAB course. With my upcoming move, it may be a while before I teach another course like this (although my experiments with targeted “flipping” went pretty well), so I am taking special care to unwind and document how things went both this year and last.
I asked the students in this year’s class about their impressions of the inverted classroom — how it’s worked for them, what could be improved, and so on. The responses fell into one of two camps: Students who were unsure of, or resistant to, the inverted classroom approach at first but eventually came to appreciate its use and get a lot out of the approach (that was about 3/4 of the class), and students who maybe still learned a lot in the class but never bought in to the inverted method. No matter what the group, one thing was a …
I am a mathematician and educator with interests in cryptology, computer science, and STEM education. I am affiliated with the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. The views here are my own and are not necessarily shared by GVSU.
The Chronicle Blog Network, a digital salon sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education, features leading bloggers from all corners of academe. Content is not edited, solicited, or necessarily endorsed by The Chronicle. More on the Network...
Follow Casting Out Nines through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE