Educational Technology Newsletter

Overview: Multimedia for Teaching and Learning

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:06:28 +0000

This issue of the UMass Boston Educational Technology Newsletter focuses on the use of multimedia in higher education, offering an exploration from my own point of view as a faculty member who has gradually learned to incorporate more media in my own teaching but without a clear rationale or a coherent plan.I begin the issue with a reflection on my own experience, as a learner (attending a recent lecture) and as a teacher (in some of the attempts I’ve made thus far). As I reflected on those experiences, however, I quickly realized that I didn’t actually know whether there was any evidence that incorporating different media contributes to student learning in significant ways, so I asked the question “Why Multimedia” and tried to find some answers about when and how the use of multimedia in teaching has been shown to be effective.

I also decided to learn from the example of some of my colleagues who are leading the way: I visited (virtually, through Blackboard) some classes taught by David Pruett of the Performing Arts Department who has been integrating images and sound in the lectures for his music courses and capturing these multimedia classroom sessions (re-mediating them) to make them available in Blackboard for his students’ later review. I attended a presentation given by Mary Brady of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction who shared videotapes her students had made of lessons they taught as student teachers and spoke of the multiple ways in which videotaping has been effective in their learning. I attended meetings in which faculty who have been using a multimedia tool, VoiceThread, shared and discussed their students’ work with this tool and attended presentations about that work given by Tracy Brown (ESL), Kayo Yushito (Modern Languages), and Susan Mraz (Hispanic Studies). Finally, from presentations, workshops, and conversations, I learned more about what our support folks and media specialists in the Digital Learning Studio (Jessica Downa, John Mazzarella, Mary Simone) have to teach us and the resources and support that they can provide for us as we continue on our own media pathways. While I feel somewhat daunted by how much more there is to learn, I feel, at the same time, reassured that none of us have to undertake this journey unsupported.

I also want to note that, as we consider the value of using multimedia not only to support our teaching but also to make what we learn available to others, we’ve been trying to record more of the forums and teaching events that are cosponsored by CIT and Educational Technology.

Videos of two of our Fall 2011 forums have been posted on the UMass/Boston YouTube channel:

Fostering Peer Learning with Social Media on October 5, 2011 featured Bill Hagar (Biology) on supporting student collaboration in science gateway seminars with Wikispaces, and Alex Mueller (English) on online collaboration for peer review.

Engaging Students with Technology on November 7, 2011 featured Lynnell Thomas (American Studies) on engaging students using Blackboard’s discussion features, Anamarija Frankic (EEOS) on how developing a website has supported students’ community-based environmental projects, and Tracy Brown (ESL) on her uses of VoiceThread and other media to help strengthen students speaking and listening skills.

Thinking about Multimedia

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:05:09 +0000

One starting point for an inquiry into the possible advantages of using multimedia to support engagement and learning was to reflect on my own experience as a learner and as a teacher.

I put myself in the role of a learner recently, when I attended a talk at Tufts by former president, Bill Clinton. In the talk, Clinton reviewed a number of activities he’s been involved with around the world—AIDS action in Africa, efforts to create effective infrastructure in Haiti. He’s an effective and knowledgeable speaker, and I enjoyed listening to him. But as I listened, I kept wanting some visuals that would help me better remember what I was hearing and imagine the settings where the work was taking place. And as I looked around the vast auditorium to observe students, I realized that they were less engaged than I was. Many were looking down at their cell phones or looking around for their friends. Many left the minute the formal speech ended and before the Q&A session began. Although large numbers of students had turned out for this “event,” it seemed to be just one more (and a non-required) lecture for them. Would the multimedia that would have supported my own learning from this talk also have engaged them? Perhaps not, but in an era where most of their non-school learning involves such media, such an addition might have made a difference. The William J. Clinton Foundation website does include multimedia examples that help to illustrate the very points Clinton was making and includes an interactive map showing the areas around the world reached by different aspects of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, such as the effort to combat Malaria.

Indeed I found that many visuals that would have effectively illustrated Clinton’s talk could have been taken directly from the website. With such visual “hooks,” I think that I (and perhaps the students) would have been more engaged and retained much more of what I heard.

(I also want to note that another way of engaging participants in such settings has been to encourage the use of social media–to suggest a hashtag to be used on Twitter, for example. But no one invited students to use social media as a way of reacting to what they heard and when I searched Twitter with #billclinton the next morning to see whether anyone had used that hashtag to comment on the speech, I found only one post about the event, from a Tufts graduate student. Look for an upcoming newsletter issue on social media.)

In my own teaching, I’ve been working to integrate more media since I began posting materials online, on an English department website, about eight years ago. For my course on Language and Literature, where we explore how various authors work with language to create worlds, I post audio selections for portions of texts that students might choose to analyze, offering them the chance to listen first, to enter those worlds through the voice of a character or narrator before turning to the words on the page. At the same time they record the natural conversational exchanges of friends and family, posting those exchanges to our class site, analyzing how they work and considering how such features as tone can be carried over to the printed word.

For online courses I create narrated lectures with lots of visuals to illustrate key concepts, such as, in pragmatics, the frequent gap between a speaker’s intention and a listener’s understanding of that intention in a speech act.

One lesson I’ve learned, I think, is that while having some multimedia objects present on an online site can help to reinforce students’ learning, having students create those objects themselves contributes even more, whether it’s selecting a salient portion of a recorded conversation to post or working in a small group to create a topic page for a week’s discussion, one that includes relevant cartoons, videos, etc. But my uses of multimedia in my own teaching have been invented, borrowed, and somewhat uninformed. So my next step was to make a quick foray into the research on multimedia and learning.

Research on Multimedia and Learning

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:04:04 +0000

How might the use of multimedia contribute to students’ learning and thus to our teaching? Several possible answers came to mind immediately:

Our students, who are now used to the integration of media in other areas of their lives, are likely to be more engaged when they find such media being used in their courses.
Students may actually learn more when they take in information through more than one channel.
Faculty may be able to present materials that are more powerfully explanatory and thus enhance their students’ learning through the judicious use of multimedia.

Here’s what I’ve discovered about each possibility.

1. Are students more engaged in multimedia settings?
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) offers an institutional assessment of how much students report being engaged in the sorts of activities that are linked to overall learning success and of the degree to which such activities are supported at each institution (see Engaging Learners Across the Curriculum in an earlier issue of this newsletter. But the NSSE focuses on benchmarks such as level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, and enriching educational experience and addressing these benchmarks doesn’t necessarily require the use of multimedia.

So is there any evidence that multimedia make a difference in engagement? The one study I found that attempted to directly measure students’ engagement and motivation related to NSSE benchmarks, focused on sections of an online psychology course with different amounts of multimedia, from none to multiple uses—images, video, narrated PowerPoint slides(Mandernach, 2009). While open-ended responses suggested that students felt more engaged in the course sections where more media were used, a quantitative analysis of survey results did not show significant differences. (The strongest focus across all sections was on “performance engagement,” on doing well in the course.)

Other evidence of student engagement comes from the study of problem-based learning, where inquiries into authentic, complex problems has been shown to increase students’ engagement in their learning, and analysis of observational and interview data from classes where multimedia were used in defining these problems (as in a history unit on the civil rights movement) suggests that a “multimedia problem-based unit provided an authentic context for encountering historical content, provoked empathetic views of historical dilemmas, and encouraged meaningful encounters with historical issues that promoted engagement and more advanced epistemological beliefs about history” (Brush and Saye, 2008).
So there’s at least some suggestive evidence that students perceive themselves to be more engaged in their courses when multimedia are used.

2. Can students learn more with multimedia?
Here too the evidence is mixed, and the enhancement of student learning seems to depend a great deal on how multimedia are used. In a 2007 paper, David Swisher asked a question much like my own: “Does Multimedia Truly Enhance Learning?” and sought an answer through a review of several directions in research. Some of the earlier research involved “media comparison studies,” such as one in which participants were presented with text or video versions of a news story. Although participants who viewed videos (or other multimedia) in such studies experienced increased engagement and affective response, they didn’t do better on such traditional cognitive measures of learning as recalling and summarizing the content.

While such studies focused on straightforward information processing, others have looked at not only recall but also application, the transfer of information to new situations. The guru of multimedia learning (as evidenced by how often he’s cited by others) seems to be Richard Mayer of the Psychology Department at UC Santa Barbara. Mayer’s research has shown that when visuals are used in direct support of textual information, as when graphics are used to illustrate a point (such as how a bike pump works), participants who have had both graphic and textual explanations are better able to both recall and apply that information than those who received only textual explanations. It seems that as long as an illustration is directly relevant to the point being made and it appears in proximity to the text it’s connected to, it helps learners to make connections across different modes of representation. If not (if, for example, it appears on the next page in a textbook), it becomes more of a distraction than an enhancement, and increases the cognitive load on the reader who is processing the material (2001).
Where students are asked to do more than recall information—when they’re involved in the more active sense-making associated with a constructivist view of learning—receiving information from different media (and thus through different information channels) seems to matter more, perhaps in part because providing information through two channels, visual and auditory, may help to spread the cognitive load for processing that information. Yet it becomes important that learners make meaningful connections between the things that are represented in different modes. When learners can put their cognitive resources toward building such active connections, they perform better in both retaining and applying information and the close pairing of text and illustrations and of narration and animation resulted in both better retention and increased transfer to the solving of new problems (Mayer, 2001).

3) Can the use of multimedia help faculty make the presentation of their materials more powerfully explanatory, in ways that better support student learning?

Recent work by Rob Lue, a biology professor at Harvard University, builds on the above understandings about multimedia and learning. As described in a Harvard Magazine article on the use of new media by Harvard faculty (Lambert 2009), Lue has been studying the effects of using animations that show how biological processes occur, looking at students’ retention of basic facts and their ability to intepret new data and integrate them into a coherent model as well as their motivation to learn, and found significant gains in all three areas. He describes his efforts as”opening a window on a world that we don’t have the tools to see with our eyes” and explains that ” Scientists create visual models in their heads, and now we have the tools to share those models with students” thus helping students to develop the “synthetic thinking” that’s essential to work in the field (3).

Lue’s work connects to Mayer’s understanding that multimedia are most effectively used when they focus on several key elements of the learning process: selecting and converting verbal representations into visual and vice versa; building coherent mental representations; and integrating new information into long term memory in a way that can be used to solve transfer problems. (Mayer, 2008)

Finally, a few principles for best practice are emerging from the work of Mayer and his colleagues (see Clark and Mayer, 2003)who have found that

Helpful uses of multimedia include providing representative graphics to illustrate concrete facts and concepts; animation to illustrate processes, procedures, and principles; organizational graphics are to show relationships between and among ideas and lesson topics; and interpretive illustrations such as graphs to convey relationships between variables.
Multimedia need to be immediately relevant and closely tied to instructional content (not merely decorative as in the clip art or irrelevant audio tracks that often accompany student presentations).
It’s important not to overload students’ processing capacity by offering too much information in visual and auditory modes at once. For example, we keep hearing that less is more on PowerPoint slides and that we should reduce the text, but it seems that if we ask students to process textual information along with images (both use a visual processing channel) while giving a verbal explanation that they have to process aurally, we may overload their cognitive processing capacity, while if we offer just the image and the spoken words, we reduce that processing load.
And it’s important not to get carried away and be overly redundant in the use of media. Although getting information in two modes seems to be helpful to learning, getting too much information across modes at the same time is not. Students learn better, for example, from an animation with narration than with an animation, narration, and text . (It seems that too much redundancy increases working memory load, which interferes with the transfer of information to long-term memory.)
Finally, it seems that personalized media, media that the professor has created or adapted to the course, are more effective than more generic media.

I plan to test my own uses of multimedia against these best practices in the future.
References

Brush, Thomas and Saye, John (2008) “The Effects of Multimedia-Supported Problem-based Inquiry on Student Engagement, Empathy, and Assumptions About History,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 4. Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ijpbl/vol2/iss1/4.

Clark, R. C. & Mayer, R. E. (2003). e- Learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.

Lambert, Craig. (2009). “ Professor video.” Harvard Magazine. November/December. <http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/new-media-transform-college-classes?page=0,2>

Manderach, B. J. (2009). Effects of instructor-personalized multimedia in the online classroom. IRRODL. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/606/1263

Mayer, R. E. (2008). Applying the science of Learning: Evidence-Based Principles for the Design of Multimedia Instruction American Psychologist 12 1 2008 760-68.

Mayer, R.E. (2005). The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Swisher, D. J. (2007). “Does Multimedia Truly Enhance Learning? Moving Beyond the Visual Media Bandwagon Toward Instructional Effectiveness.” Kansas State at Salinas Professional Day Papers. Retrieved from
http://www.sal.ksu.edu/facultystaff/Swisher_ProfessionalDay07_paper.pdf

Multimedia at UMass Boston: Supporting Classroom Learning

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:03:19 +0000

Many faculty at UMass/Boston are using multimedia in their teaching. Among them is ethnomusicologist David Pruett of the Performing Arts department. To experience such teaching, imagine entering his classroom as a student.
As you enter the room for each class session in American Music, you’ll find a slide on the screen in front of you with multiple images flashing on it, related to the day’s topic while music plays in the background. On this day, where the focus is on elements of music, and specifically, aspects of tonality, you’ll find the following slide, with individual images that will be repeated as topics come up in the course of the lecture.

The PowerPoint slides introduce key concepts and ideas. Words on the screen, such a definition of tonality, are read aloud by a student volunteer, so that others both hear them and read them.

Representations of chords appear on the screen while David plays the notes on a keyboard. A slide introducing the concept of the scale offers an image of the C octave on a keyboard.

Throughout the “lecture,” students are asked to engage as a class, responding to questions and prompts about what they hear and see, and in small groups. They listen to a recording of Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues” and break into groups to analyze theme, form, and elements such as harmony.

Some key elements of this course design are repeated in later classes. Students come to expect the opening slide with the flashing images that foreshadow (and will be repeated for) key elements of the day’s lesson, the relevant music playing in the background, the connections between sound and image and text.

Here’s the opening slide for a class session on the history of American music in the post-war era. Later slides help students link images of key figures of this period to important events, or other significant changes. In a section on the role of technology, the image of the first tape recorder provides a visual cue for the important notion that, while the ability to record music performance had been an important development, the ability to splice tape and thus to edit and even rearrange the sound of an individual performance, rather than just record it, had even more impact on the development of the music we listen to today.

Finally, David captures the content of all of his class sessions–all the slides with images and words that are projected from his computer screen, and all of the sounds associated with those slides, including his own voice as he introduces course content and the voices of many of his students as they contribute and respond, through the lecture-recording system, Camtasia. He then posts the links to these files on his Blackboard course site, so that students can download and review the full lecture content later.

David says:

“My goal is to integrate multi-media as a tool to enhance the classroom experience, rather than replacing it. I find that a variety of stimuli, including visual, aural, and cognitive facilitate a positive learning environment that, in turn, aids in content comprehension and retention. My students frequently comment on the efficacy of the classroom multi-media experience coupled with the detailed course website that includes streaming audio and video examples from class sessions. In addition, my students are able to benefit from the Camtasia lecture recording software that allows me to post entire lectures to the course website that the students can view on any computer anytime. The Camtasia software has proven especially beneficial to students who have English as a second language and want to review or students who are absent on any given day and want to stay current with class discussions.”

To visit these two class sessions and see how different media are being used in David’s classroom, and to see what can be made to students available through Camtasia recordings, visit his lesson on tonality or learn a little about American music in the post-war era.

Multimedia at UMass Boston: Video Recording

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:02:09 +0000

Video recording is playing a larger role in many of our classes. Video recording devices such as flip videos and smart phones are readily available. And that availability makes it easy for faculty to integrate video production into coursework in various ways across disciplines. Yu Wu in the department of Modern Languages records skits prepared and presented by Chinese 101 students and asks them to watch and comment on each others presentations. Bill Hagar of the Biology department records his students’ prepared debates about current controversies in science, to be posted to the class wiki for their review.

As a teacher educator in the College of Education and Human Development, Mary Brady has been asking the student teachers she supervises to videotape their own lessons for several reasons. One is that, as the college goes through national and state accreditation reviews, there needs to be evidence that shows student learning outcomes. Another is that it helps to support good practice by teachers—as they review their own videotapes, student teachers can observe, for example, their own patterns of interaction with students: whether they allow enough time for students’ responses to their questions or whether they call on some students more than others. An unanticipated outcome that Mary has found is that student teachers become more comfortable giving each other positive and corrective feedback in a professional way. Learning to both accept and offer such feedback will be important to their future roles as educators.
As she has moved, with her students, into the world of videotaping, Mary has been assisted by media specialist Jessica Downa from the Digital Learning Studio. Jessica has videotaped lessons in school settings as models for what student teachers themselves might do, she has developed materials related to planning a video and preparing a storyboard for capturing key elements, producing a video (recording and editing), and exporting the video to a class wiki, Youtube, or another site. Students learn about lighting, framing, how to set context with a wide shot and when to zoom in to capture a particular classroom interaction. Her materials, available at edu-digital-literacy.wikispaces.com, also address issues such as copyright and permissions and offer resources such as royalty free music and images.
Lesson planning and video planning end up informing each other in Mary Brady’s classes. Once students have created a lesson plan, they need to identify the standards for which they want to capture video evidence. In planning for their videos, they often clarify their goals with the lesson and how they’ll meet them. To get comfortable with the recording process and with being on camera, students practice recording mock lessons with each other. Then they do some recording in the school classroom, so that the children, in turn, will feel comfortable being recorded, sharing these trial videos with the children and talking about what they’d like to show about the class (such as “how good a job you are all doing working in groups”).
After particular lessons are videotaped, the videos are reviewed by the student teachers, their cooperating teachers and their university supervisor, offering an occasion for a detailed analysis of how the lesson has worked and how it might be improved—working with the actual evidence of the lesson vs. more fleeting recollections from the teacher or observer.
Beyond its immediate instructional purposes, the video will become part of the teaching eportfolio that each of our prospective teachers must produce. Students edit the raw footage of their videos into more polished final versions that will show clearly the teaching moves that they want to document as part of their teaching repertoire and compress the videos for use on the eportfolio platform.

Interestingly, the videotaping process is altering both the ways in which UMass/Boston student teachers are reflecting on, documenting, and understanding their teaching and the ways in which their young learners are perceiving the workings of their classrooms as they too view the videos and consider how they can contribute to showing how teaching and learning go on there.

Multimedia Teaching at UMass Boston: Using VoiceThread

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:01:09 +0000

If including multimedia elements in a professor’s presentation of material can contribute to students’ learning, then asking students to participate more directly in multimedia projects should offer even more opportunities for the active construction of new understandings. One new tool that’s being piloted here at UMass Boston helps to facilitate such participation. VoiceThread is an easy-to-use tool that supports the building of slide sequences with images and video links, but it also allows any member of a class to comment on or respond to the slides, by speaking or writing.

Here is an example of a VoiceThread from Tracy Brown’s ESL Listening and Speaking course.

Here Tracy has posed a question about a slide she has created (and her image appears as she speaks). As her students comment, their images or icons are added to the frame. What results is a collection of audio comments, allowing students both to hear what their classmates have to say in English and to hear what they themselves have said. In other instances, Tracy has students create their own VoiceThreads, narrating a set of slides that they create with images that they select. Again their classmates can participate in each Voicethread, commenting on what they hear and see on any slide.
Teachers of other languages are using Voicethread in different ways. Kayo Yoshida of Modern Languages says that her students tell her that they don’t have enough chance to practice Japanese outside of the classroom. Kayo has videotaped herself (using her computer’s videocam) asking questions related to each chapter in her 101 textbook and imbedded those videos in VoiceThreads which she then uploads to Blackboard.

Students record their responses on the VoiceThread. But they can first practice many times, and then record when they feel comfortable. Kayo encourages them to select icons rather than photos to represent themselves because she believes that when their face isn’t associated with their answers, they will feel less uncomfortable about making mistakes before others. Used their American name, not actual name in many instances. Using VoiceThread also allows students to make up oral class work that they missed, creating a VoiceThread substitute for an in-class oral interview, for example.
Susan Mraz of Hispanic Studies was (along with Tracy Brown) one of the early campus users of VoiceThread. Susan uses VoiceThread in a number of different ways. Like Kayo, she too creates videos for her textbook chapters. Her students watch the videos and then in VoiceThread they do episode summaries in Spanish for each scene. For Spanish 102, where students are mastering past tense narration, Susan creates image sequences in VoiceThread to provide a story without words (for example a set of images about a woman who lost a dog) that students then narrate in Spanish. Or she’ll record a reading of a short story and then have students read and record their own readings. Or they’ll watch a movie (e.g. Volver) in Spanish and she’ll create a set of Voicethread slides with snippets of the movie’s scenes. Students then put the scenes in order and describe the scenes, drawing on the visual images to point out particular details. And finally, Susan takes pictures of students’ class presentations and puts these images into VoiceThread, where classmates give their feedback to the presenter. Susan finds VoiceThread to be “the easiest tool I’ve ever worked with,” and now that she’s using it with an app for iPad, she’s finding it easier then ever.

Susan has created a wiki tutorial “Using VoiceThreads to Enhance Oral Communication”–a guide for others who are starting to use VoiceThread in their teaching

Other language faculty using Voicethread include Thierry Gustave (French), Susana Domingo (Spanish), Diego Mansilla (Spanish), and Yu Wu (Chinese), and they’d be happy to share their experiences.

If language acquisition is fueled by relatively low-risk opportunities to hear and use the language, and if work with multimedia enhances both recall and application in learning, then engaging in the sorts of VoiceThread activities these faculty are designing should support their students’ language learning in significant ways.
While VoiceThread is currently being used at UmassBoston for the teaching of English and other languages, the VoiceThread website offers many instances of its use across disciplines—where students have constructed VoicetThreads exploring social concerns such as child abuse, to create an online art exhibit in which students comment on their own and each others’ work and teachers have created minilessons (e.g. using a protractor to measure angles). A personal favorite (accessed on 12/12/11) is Nel Pierce ‘s Art Gallery, in which an artist comments on her work across different media.

If you’re looking for an easy and powerful multimedia tool, explore some VoiceThread examples, download a free trial version, and visit Susan Mraz’s wiki. If you’re interested in using VoiceThread in the future, contact Mary Simone in the Digital Learning Studio.

Multimedia Resources at UMass Boston

Ellie Kutz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:00:15 +0000

If you’re interested in incorporating different forms of multimedia in your teaching, where might you begin?
Your first stop could be the Digital Learning Studio on the third floor of Healey Library, where media specialists Jessica Downa and John Mazzarella provide consultations and support. And you can check the schedule of IT workshops at www.umb.edu/training to find workshops on using various multimedia tools, including Photoshop for editing and creating images.The several university-supported content platforms that faculty use in their teaching (Blackboard, Wikispaces, and the Blog Network) all support the uploading of media files, including audio and video (and the new Blackboard 9 will make this easier). Wikispaces, on which students can create pages and upload media files to them, has proved particularly versatile for supporting students’ multimedia projects and faculty who have been creating videorecordings of class activities or Voicethreads often post them to a course wiki.Here is some additional information you might find useful.

Video recording

1.Consider when and how video recording might be used effectively in your teaching. Are there lessons for which you would want to make a video recording of yourself available to your students after a class–as you offer a science demo for example? Are there student performances or student presentations or other student exchanges that you want to capture or have your students capture and review and respond to later? Might your students use video-recording for self-evaluation of classroom discussions or presentations? Might they use them to create documentaries, conduct interviews, create marketing materials?

Here are some more ways in which UMass and other faculty have used videorecordings:

to record students’ presentations and performances (skits they’ve written for Chinese 101, presentations about current science issues in the Science Gateway Seminar) for later review
to have students record a scene and read a poem as a voice-over to that scene
to have students create narrated movie trailers about significant historical events such as the Dred Scott case
to have students keep video blogs (vlogs in courses such as marketing and social media)
to have students create documentaries on social issues
to have students create videos with images of places they’ve visited (or would like to visit), with narration in a language they’re studying

2. For most classroom and student projects, you and your students can easily record your own video. Most smart phones have video-recording capability and there are flip video cameras available in the Media Centers in each of the academic buildings (where you can reserve up to 15 units for use at one time). For larger events, such as a whole-class dramatic performance where it would be difficult for you to both record and guide the students, Jessica Downa provides a video-recording service where she’ll bring her equipment to your classroom or event and make a recording for you. She will also do a demo or workshop for your class.

3.Visit the Digital Literacy Wiki that Jessica maintains to provide video information for educators. There you will find technical instructions (e.g. how to work with a flip video camera); guides, templates and screencast videos to aid in planning and writing (storyboards), production (recording, editing), and exporting your videos, along with information about copyright, royalty-free resources, and free sources of video editing tools.

4. Visit the Digital Learning Studio (Healey 3) where computers have been set up with full video-editing software and you can arrange a tutorial with Jessica or John.

Images

1. Plan (and teach your students) to use images that will be immediately relevant to the content being presented.
2. Use the Digital Literacy wiki to find sources of royalty-free images. Capture screen shots using Jing
(a free tool and a personal favorite that I use to capture most of the images for this newsletter). Have your students take their own photos with their digital phone cameras. Or draw new images in Photoshop (part of Adobe Creative Suite CS5, available for download by Umass Boston faculty.
3. Attend a Photoshop workshop or arrange further support from Jessica or John in the Digital Learning Studio.

Audio

1. Plan ways in which audio might augment the work of your course–having students record and listen to their conversations in another language or capture snippets of conversation that show the ways in which people talk in other settings, or record students reading their poems, essays, short stories.
2. Borrow mp3 recorders from the Media Centers or use cell phone voice memo recorders.
3. Download the Audacity free audio editor and use it to edit audio files.
4. Get further support from Jessica or John in the Digital Learning Studio

VoiceThread
1. Plan ways in which you might use this multimedia tool, considering how others have used this tool and exploring new possibilities by browsing examples at VoiceThread or finding examples from other universities (see the VoiceThread Pages from the Center for Instructional and Innovative Technology at the University of Florida for resources and examples for using VoiceThread in higher education.
2. Download a free version of VoiceThread to try it out. VoiceThread apps also allow it to be used from iPhones or iPads, and students can submit their audio responses by phone.
3. Contact Mary Simone in the Digital Learning Studio to learn more about the current UMass Boston VoiceThread pilot project and future possibilities.

Camtasia
Camtasia is usually considered a classroom capture tool rather than a multimedia tool. But, as you can see from David Pruett’s examples, Camtasia can capture all of the media projected and heard in the classroom and create a new recording of the entire classroom event. A newer version of Camtasia with a webcam to capture video will soon be available at the university. To learn more about Camtasia and to join with others who have been participating in Camtasia working groups, contact Mary Simone.