Making My Job Redundant: Using Technology to Work Smart, Not Hard

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Since starting the COETAIL program, I've been converted to being a big supporter of Creative Commons (CC) as a licensing method (see: 'Why Wait!?' and 'Free to Take? Free to Give!'). As such, I've taken the time with my classes to talk about what it means, how to find images, how to properly credit images and assuring them that it is, in fact, Creative Commons and not Creative Comments. As with anything in teaching (or, perhaps more accurately, in learning), concepts are easier to understand when they're part of a tangible experience. For my Year 7s, they are doing some Presentation Zen styled presenting using CC images and my Year 8s are using image editing software as part of their unit which means that it is easy to teach about CC in context of their units.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384" caption="CC Logo from creativecommons.org"][/caption]

The challenge I've encountered is that explaining all of this takes a fair bit of time and I know that some of my lessons when teaching about this have been a bit directive and lacking in activities to keep the kids interested.  Granted, I'm lucky that most of the students I teach are pretty attentive and eager to learn so these lessons still go reasonably well but despite this, I still don't get that feeling of complete satisfaction that I've taught what is not only a useful lesson but also a fun lesson for the students. The other problem with using CC images is that even though it's fairly simple, the fact is that it is a new concept for most students and it takes practice to get used to it. Inevitably, I regularly end up having to repeat the steps of how to reference a CC image or remind the students what each of the different licenses mean.

So I decided that a bit of hard work up front would actually end up being less work in the long run and I did a screen recording about how to find CC images; what all the licenses mean; how to insert images into a Wordpress blog; how to insert images into Powerpoint; and finally how to credit them in either of those media. What I had was about an eight minute video which taught everything that used to take me four or five times as long to teach at the front of the class. At first, I thought, 'Great! I can post this to Screencast and I've just cut my lessons down by at least a quarter!' But then I started thinking beyond that initial instruction lesson and I thought about students that just wanted to be reminded of the licenses or who only wanted to know how to credit an image in their blog. Did I really want them to have to filter through an eight minute video to find the information they needed? More importantly, would their attention spans allow them to bother scanning through an eight minute video? I decided the video wasn't good enough to actually solve the problem of me having to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I took some digital scissors and cut the video into three smaller, more digestible episodes: one focused on how to find the right image and understand the licenses associated with them; another video about adding and crediting in a Wordpress blog; and another video about adding and crediting in PowerPoint (I'm sure most Keynote users could find some value in that too). To help to better explain the licenses, I whipped up a quick FLash animation to focus on the four licenses the students would likely encounter and added that to the first video.

As my video tutorial had now become a short series of interrelated videos, I decided that Screencast might not be the best avenue for distributing these and I decided instead to post to YouTube so that I could take advantage of their easy annotating feature to make sure all the videos were effectively linked to each other. I began by posting the video about finding images and understanding licenses (shown below) and adding links at the end to either the Wordpress video or the PowerPoint video so that it suited my students regardless of whether they were making a presentation or writing a blog.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOJYnbK2wbA[/youtube]

I used this first video in class a couple of days ago with my Year 7s. Not only did it take much less time but when I saw that class again today and reviewed the information from last lesson with them, they even seemed to retain the information better. It also came in handy when students were asking how to insert and credit the images in their presentations that I could just get them to follow the link to the video for adding and crediting images to PowerPoint from the class page on our school network. This freed up my time to sit and focus on helping the students who were struggling a little bit with understanding the assignment while those that understood but had simple, clarification questions could easily find their answers through the video. I haven't field tested the video for inserting and crediting in Wordpress but I'm guessing it will yield similar results.

There are definitely some things about the tutorials that, given more time, I would change or improve. Some of the timings are perhaps a little rushed but that's solved easily enough by just rewinding and watching it over. The voice over is far from being up to a Lee Lefever standard as I wish I had had more time to rehearse and record a more solid soundtrack but the ultimate goals - of cutting down teaching time and giving my students a resource that they could return to when needing clarification - have been met so I'm generally happy with the results so far.

Please feel free to use any of these videos with your students (or staff!) and if you notice any glaring errors, please let me know so that I can get them fixed! Happy sharing!