Action Research, Round 2!

It has been a while since I've shared anything on my blog, well it has only been about two weeks but I thought now might be a nice time to share some of the initial findings from my action research project. What I have been doing is plugging in quantitative data from the attendance at our school and looking for any patterns in the attendance numbers. The good news is that our attendance has been consistently up at the building I teach in since we began using our PlascoTrac program! Feel free to download my reports in this blog and check out my findings so far... https://sites.google.com/site/travispatockaspanish/action-research-project-for-lamar/preliminary-action-research-results All of my research has documentation to prove its' validity so please, share any data from my report so far! I am also looking at the literature and case studies out there on PlascoTrac. There are a slew of case studies on schools that have begun using this program in their schools.

Web Conference #4 down, EDLD 5363 and time to finish things up!

It has been an incredible journey so far!  Again, my Lamar classes amaze me as I learn more and more about just what is out there in terms of multimedia tools and information.  I am no longer afraid to work with iMovie, do a pod cast, experiment with computer animation and graphics in my classes.  A bit part of it is simply diving right in and making the time to practice working with all of these programs and online web 2.0 tools.  Below I have posted the final edition/version of our multimedia collaboration video.  Even though some of us were 1,000 miles apart we still were able to make it work.  Using facebook to chat and google docs/drive and gmail to collaborate we worked hard to create the video below.  I hope you enjoy it.



I can't tell you how many hours I put into this video and I would have saved time had I been working with my colleagues directly, under the same building but learning how to work over long distances makes everything so much simpler.  Little things like learning how to embed video, work with html and just play around with what is out there makes this class worthwhile.  Just as a personal note I feel blessed and grateful to have such a patient wife and it helps that she too is a graduate student working hard.   All I need to do now is get going on me week 5 homework.  Actually, I spent a ton of time on it yesterday so we will see how it all comes together when it comes time to get everything turned in.  All done in time for winter break!

EDLD 5363 Weeks 3, 4 and 5 thoughts and reflections.

I have to admit that is has been wonderful having two weeks to get our group collaboration instructional video in full swing.  Thinking about it, just three weeks ago we were hosting the NFL draft of group formation lining up our partners for our EDLD 5363 multimedia project.  I ended up quickly joining a few other fellow Lamar students that I had taken previous classes with and while we had not worked together before, communicated and assisted each other regularly on our facebook class pages.  We started discussing ideas, created a script, then entered into the process of the production of the video.  Everything from multiple drafts of the script, a shot list, gathering of the media and creation/finding of the creative commons information for our projects was also completed.  We decided on splicing audio and video footage with the computer animation program, xtranormal.com in order to create this entire video.  In the end we discovered that if we were patient with each other, and communicated regularly, as well as were open with ideas, the whole process would come together nicely.  The only real technical difficulties that we ran into had to do with audio.  Two of our characters that spoke to each other in the video and during other video footage were in two completely different locations, using two completely different audio systems and comptuers therefore creating two audio files that were not balanced out.  I did my best to try and balance out the audio running as much as I could using Audacity and in the end, I think we came as close as we could to simulating the volume of two people talking to each other in the same room.  Now, it is off to the week 5 homework where I will be filling out documentation of all of our work and our final drafts of the production process.  Wish me luck!

Web conference from Saturday, 12-1-2012

Saturday mornings web conference was excellent as it gave us a chance to catch our breath and share our experiences with our podcasts, as well as any difficulties that you encounter when you deal with audio recording software.  It also was an excellent opportunity to ask specific questions of the professor in preparation of our group multimedia project.  While I am confident that our group will create an awesome 90 second video on some aspect of earth science, the collaboration part scares me but I do have an excellent team that communicates well via facebook, both messaging as well as through our shared google drive documents.  We have a template posted on our website we will be sharing that enables us to contribute to our script production of our science video and I was able to ask Dr. A, specific questions on Saturday's web conference about the creation of this program.  We are going to be using Xtranormal as it is basically an all in one animation studio which will allow us to all log in and contribute to some aspect of the video.  Collaboration, technology, publishing and instruction will not be easy but will be very rewarding in the end!

My Pod-Cast Self-Assessment EDLD 5363

Wow, a pod-cast can be a big challenge when you’ve never done one before! I hunted around online looking for the perfect video editing program that I could pod-cast a mini tutorial on and I did, that program being Screencast-O-Matic.  It is a simple enough program that you can literally be up and running in less than a minute if you know what you want to record.  What would prove to be a challenge for me was the fact that my software choice used your computer screen to record whatever it is you wanted to show off to your audience.  Being that I was doing strictly audio on my pod-cast I had to be simple in descriptions, to the point but maintain my audience with my tone and pace.  I didn’t want to rush, but at the same time I wanted to give the most effective step by step description that I could, keeping it all within a two minute time frame.  After learning how to use Audacity, as well as convert and export my pod-cast as an mp3, I was ready to go.  It took me five complete takes before I was able to record what I felt was the best recording I could possibly produce.  I don’t think there is anything I would change except maybe do a visual walkthrough of a “vod-cast” of the tutorial. 

Going off of rubric, I feel that I met the criteria and did the work necessary to make this pod-cast happen.  I also ran the mp3 through iMovie and from there was able to add titles, as well as my Creative Commons Copyright that I created from creativecommons.org and applied it to not only my pod-cast, but also the script that I published online. All in all, I put no less than 10 hours into a pod-cast that lasted 10 minutes.  That includes composing the script, collaborating, editing, learning to use Audacity, recording, then recording again 5 times, uploading to iMovie, editing, and sharing.  If anything my voice was not 100% simply because I recorded this pod-cast late in the evening after a full day of conducting Spanish classes as well as coming off a nasty head-cold and sore throat so for what I was able to produce, it was the best job I could do!  I give myself 100%! And I look forward to using these pod-casts in my class, if anything as a way to communicate the work for the day with my students.

Minutes take hours...The Podcast for EDLD 5363

OK, so let's check out what it took for me to get that podcast on Blogger...

I started out by downloading and learning how to use Audacity, a free audio recording program.  This would be the program that I would be using to record my voice.  From there I needed to install a LAME mp3 encoder that I would use to convert the Audacity file to an mp3.  My Audacity program refused to convert due to an unknown error.  After further research I discovered an alternative LAME encoder file, at audacity.com, that I was able to use in order to convert the file.  After that, I discovered that you can't directly upload mp3's to youtube so I opened iMovie and began my next project.  I created a simple background for my iMovie with the name of my video as well as my own name that would be displayed for the majority of the podcast.  The last 8 seconds or so of my podcast show off the Creative Commons Copyright information that I created at creativecommons.org that I would use to copyright my podcast.  I copied and pasted that information into my final frame of my iMovie podcast.  The program I decided to give my tutorial on was called screencast-o-matic and it is a program you can use to record live whatever you are doing on the desktop of your laptop.  I composed a script to read for the podcast.  Took me 5 takes to get it right.  Then I exported the audio recording from Audacity to my laptop desktop and from there loaded it into iTunes so that I could add it as the soundtrack to my iMovie.  I kept things simple but I could have added captions or animations but what i was doing but for now, the basic podcast was my goal.  After I finished editing my iMovie, I exported the video to the desktop of my computer and uploaded it to you tube.  I also included all Creative Commons Copyright information in the description of the video.

After that, I copied the embedded code from youtube in an html view of my blogger blog entry and pasted the code into it.  Reverted back to my compose view of blogger and hit "publish".  After that I noticed my video was a bit large so I went back in and bascially winging it, re-wrote the html code by manually changing the size of my video.  Sure enough, by cutting out 40 pixels of width, I was able to get the video to fit and look good in my Blogger blog.

I also did the same on my google sites website but I used an embed gadget on a page I created specially for my podcast.  Included my Creative Commons information again and saved all of my work.  I also added the script of my podcast just in case anyone would need a hard copy of what I say.

I've spent around 8 hours on this project total from start to finish but will still go back and will tweak a few things.

These podcasts are great because just like my iMovie project, I could record lessons that I could (thanks to all of my practice now) quickly upload to youtube or my google site for students to download and listen to.

Here is my first podcast for EDLD 5363!

Enjoy...(Embedded, non the less!)  All Creative Commons Copyright information will appear below.




Screencast-O-Matic Tutorial by Travis Patocka is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at screencast-o-matic.com.