Pencasts – on demand
“We want worked examples of difficult exam questions”
This was the response many of my students gave when I asked them what they wanted from our VLE next year. These students have been using our VLE extensively; accessing web pages, animations, quizzes and simulation for EVERY topic in our AS Chemistry course! It had taken us two years to develop this content and we only had two months until the start of the A2 course – so it was time to cherry pick and come up with new ideas.
It was clear how ‘worked examples’ could help them, since there was sound pedagogical theory to support this approach.
“While studying a worked example working memory is …free for learning!”, Clarck & Mayer, 2007)
Using the VLE to give them more opportunities to access ‘worked examples’ seemed like a good use of technology (even if it was replication of classroom practice and not necessarily innovative e-learning).
So, how to do this? Simply recording a teacher scribbling on a whiteboard often fails although there are some good examples.
To address the problems of not being able to experience the exposition from the teacher and see the text clearly I have previously used a ‘picture in picture (PiP)’ videos. Below is an example, where I recorded a colleague explaining some calculations steps and showed the workings using PowerPoint making it easy to read.
But this took me 6 hours to prepare, record and edit and I need to see my kids!
I needed something that was quick to develop and would allow me to capture both the sequence of steps involved and the rational for carrying out each step. The solution – a ‘Pencast’: recording your scribbles in synch with audio.
There are a couple of technologies available to do this:
I tried a tablet PC and a pen tablet but found that they didn’t give sufficient precision for recording detailed writing. So I chose the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. This is a pen containing a high quality microphone and a minature camera that records your scribes made on special dotted paper. The software with this pen allows you to download your ‘Pencast’ from your pen to your PC using Livescibe desktop. The ‘pencast’ can be shared and embedded on web pages using Livescribe’s hosting service. Livescribe provide up to 250Mb of “free” space (when you buy a pen), with a 13 minute Pencast using about 88Kb. Following a couple of test runs I found the precision with which the writing / drawing is recorded was impressive and the quality of the audio recording was surprisingly good!
The next challenge was how to use this Smartpen to ‘Pencast’ a worked example. There are a number of great examples of where people have done this effectively – Tim Fahlberg produced the following video which he called a Mathcast.
The issue I had (and still have) was that I wanted to show how we extract information from a complex exam question, like the one shown below. The ability to do this was key to the effectiveness of this technique!
Unfortunately, the only way to get this information onto the Pencast was to hand write the question onto the special dotted Livescribe paper – disappointing! In order to distinguish between the question and the answer it is possible to make the text different colours. To do this you need to write (the question in this case) on the paper without recording any sound and then write the answer whilst recording sound. To make the distinction between question and answer easier I asked one of my colleagues to write the question in their hand-writing (which is unfortunately much neater than mine!).
A couple of lessons learned before I show you my first Pencast…
So, here my first attempt at a Pencast, embedded from the Livescribe site:
In case you didn’t notice, there is a great feature when playing back the Pencast that enables you show everything up front, or see the scribbles that are going to be made (in grey) or hide these completely.
Even better, if you keep the future scribbles visible (grey) you can navigate the Pencast by clicking on different parts of the Pencast to rewind / fast forward the Pencast to the part where that writing / drawing was made. That’s in addition to using the progress bar at the bottom – give it a try!
Unfortunately you cannot edit your Pencast using the Livescribe application. If you want to edit your Pencast you will need to play it back and record your screen using software or a site like Screenr.
So that’s it, Pencasting…not in Wikipedia yet; I wonder how long that will take?
Just had an email from Assitant Professor Dan Stasko from The University of Southern Maine. He is doing some very interesting work using Pencast with his Chemisty classes…worth a look at his blog where he distributes the pencasts recored in his lectures.
http://danhasclass.blogspot.com/