What I found out about the difference between Digital Storytelling and telling stories using technology…

This advice from JISC Digital Media about ways to improve your videos is so useful that we decided to post it on our blog. For more information about the advice, guidance and services that they provide please visit http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Improve your Videos in 4 Easy Steps

Often the difference between’ acceptable’ and ‘rather good’ is quite small. This, in my experience is certainly the case with amateur videos. I’ve seen a lot of self-made videos, particularly in the world of education, and again and again the same problems keep cropping up, problems which are actually very easy to rectify.

Here are my top 4. Pay attention to these and you will immediately see an improvement in the materials you produce on video.

1) Bad Lighting

The advent of autoexposure systems on camera and camcorders may have simplified the process of getting a properly exposed image but it hasn’t eliminated the need for user involvement. If you still believe that you can simply point your camcorder at a subject and it will produce lovely videos, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

The problem is simply this: the camera doesn’t know what the subject of your video is: is it the tree on the right? The picture hanging on the wall in the top of frame? Or perhaps the person standing slightly left of centre. The camcorder will use some sort of algorithm to come up with an exposure that will work in many circumstances, but it will rarely be perfect and will often be awful.

So how can you help your camcorder to calculate better exposures? Here are a few tips.

· Make sure there’s some light falling on your subject, preferably from the front (i.e. from your side of the subject) and a bit to one side. If the illumination comes from a ceiling light, it should be behind you and to one side. This applies to sunlight as well – but beware of squinting subjects.

· If you can’t get good lighting of your subject in the current location, move to a new one! Even if you can get good lighting in your location, be prepared to move both yourself and your subject around to find the best light.

· People tend to have their desks next to the window whenever possible. Unfortunately, this means that when you shoot someone at your desk it’s very likely that there’ll be a window behind them. If this is the case, do not shoot them at their desk – or at least try to find an angle where the window isn’t behind them, because otherwise you are guaranteed to have a bad image.

2) Shaky camera

This is perhaps the most common problem with amateur videos. Oddly, it is also the most easily corrected. How? Simple: get a tripod and use it religiously. It is not possible to hand-hold a camcorder of any size for a significant length of time without introducing some sort of shake or wobble into the image. This applies to pocket camcorders as well, because it is not the weight of the camcorder that’s the problem but rather the length of time you have to hold it still.

When you get a tripod, make sure it is a video tripod, not one for a stills camera. The difference is in the tripod head: a proper video head will permit smooth camera motion (panning left and right and tilting up and down), something which is not possible on a stills tripod.

There’s really no excuse for not using a tripod, not even expense. It is possible to get little desktop tripods (not the best solution but still better than hand-holding) for as little as £3.

3) Bad sound

In order to get a good picture we want to have the camera far enough away from the subject to see them. In order to get good sound we want to have the microphone very close to the subject’s mouth. So what do we do if the microphone is built into the camcorder? Simple: we get either bad sound or a bad picture – and picture unfortunately tends to trump sound.

This is unfortunate because the sound quality of the video is usually more important than picture quality, particularly when making educational resources. Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem?

The best solution is to use an external microphone such as a lapel mic. Even the cheapest such mic will give results significantly better than a built-in mic. We can then get excellent sound without compromising on picture quality. There are camcorders available at all price ranges which take external mics: make this a requirement when purchasing one.

Failing this, it is necessary to find a location which can at least partially make up for the shortcomings of the built-in mic. Try to shoot your video in a room which is not only quiet but also not too bright acoustically. The less noise there is on the audio part of your recording, the better the sounds you want will come out.

4) No editing

Even a tiny amount of editing can improve the look of your video immensely. There are numerous free editing systems available nowadays which can provide you the tools to perform basic editing, and even more sophisticated free systems are beginning to appear.

The most basic type of editing is called topping and tailing. Not surprisingly, this consists of removing the bits and the beginning and the end which you don’t need.

If you want to get a bit more sophisticated than that you might edit further to ’clean up’ the video: to remove mistakes, pauses and sections irrelevant to the intended purpose of the video. In addition it is possible to import slides into much simple editing software. These can then be inserted where appropriate in the video. Not only will the quality of the slides be better than if the projected slides were shot with the camcorder, they can also be used to hide edits made during the clean up.

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advance service which provides advice about anything having to do with digital media. All of our advice including the helpdesk, our extensive library of documents and more is completely free to any FE or HE institution in the UK.

This time last year we at JISC RSC Wales were preparing for our first ever ‘roadshow’,  Barrier Busters - Accessibility and Inclusion. The idea of the roadshows was that instead of asking you to travel to us (usually in mid-Wales) in order to take part in and hopefully benefit from any training or discussion forums we organised, we would bring the event to you in different parts of Wales. In 2010 we ran 3 separate roadshows on 3 different themes in all 4 corners of Wales. As with all of our events the contents and outcomes from those events can be found in our online event support areas:

• Barrier Busters – Accessibility and Inclusion
• Learner Voice Learner Choice
• Small Steps, Great Strides – Organisational Improvement

Our latest roadshow, the first for 2011, is entitled ‘Advance and Enhance‘, the purpose of which is to bring people together to focus in a practical way on how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and at a distance.

More details about the event can be found in the programme here: tinyurl.com/advanceandenhance

Details of the dates and venues are below … just click on the relevant link to be taken to the booking:

• 1st February 2011 – Cardiff
• 9th February 2011 – Swansea
• 22nd March 2011 – Llandudno

We look forward to seeing you there!

I have long been a fan of JISC TechDis (especially when working in a college Learning Centre) and the work they do providing resources, advice and support to learning providers, with regard to making learning and teaching more accessible and inclusive. We (JISC RSC Wales) work closely with JISC TechDis and those of you who attended any of our recent events, especially ‘Barrier Busters: Accessibility and Inclusion‘ roadshows or ‘Learning in a Digital Wales‘, will know this and you, your organisation and your learners will hopefully have benefitted in some way.

JISC TechDis have just launched their new website (beta) at ALT-C 2010 and all I wanted to do in this brief blog post was take the opportunity to highlight the new website, which I think is a great improvement on the original because things are much easier to find, especially all of the really good stuff like the Accessibility Essentials series (making Word documents, presentations and pdfs more accessible). I also have to say that I’m envious of the handy ‘Accessibility’ button at the top right of the page, which opens an ‘Accessibility Tool’ menu, making it really easy to make changes to the text and background of the website

JISC TechDis say that the new website ‘will radically improve the accessibility of advice and resources by freshening and strengthening our web presence. At the same time, it will incorporate new content that, integrated with other aspects of our Service delivery, will help us meet the needs of our various stakeholders in a more efficient and cost effective way‘.  Sounds like a a good thing to me, so definitely one to keep your eye on!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

… an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). Taking my lead from my colleague Karl’s recent post  ‘A month in the life of … an eLearning Advisor (Learning Resources), I thought it might be an interesting experience to do the same thing, for myself but also for anyone who reads this and is interested to know what a month in the life of a JISC RSC Wales eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies) can look like. The first thing to say is that every day/week/month is different but that ultimately I am here to provide a service to our supported post 16 learning providers in Wales. Karl’s blog post focussed on the wide range of queries he and Sam deal with, so to make this different from his great blog I’m going to give an example of a selection of the activities I have been involved in over the last month, starting with the queries.

Queries
These are just a few of the queries (received in person, via email or Skype or over the phone) I have delt with this month:

Text Wall - we use a text wall to collect comments and questions from delegates who attend our events. During our recent ‘Learner Voice, Learner Choice’ roadshow we also suggested it might be one of the many tools that could be used to record the learner voice. A number of the organisations who attended the event had borrowed the text wall for a short period (in return for some feedback on how it goes) to try it out with their learners (Learning Centre suggestion box, opinions of Moodle, during Adult Learners Week, for feedback on lessons …) and one contacted me to ask for more details of the service (options for different walls, cost) because it was proving to be successful and she was interested in having their own wall. One follow up job for this week is to contact all of those who have borrowed a wall to find out how they got on. I’ll share the results via this blog.

Legal advice – at the last of our roadshows ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ I had a query from a college about whether there were any legal requirements or implications regarding allowing parent’s access to learners eILPs. JISC Legal, one of the JISC Advance services are almost always my first port of call for education related legal advice, so I contacted them and received a response within days which I passed on. Rather than attempt to summarise the response here the legal information regarding eILPs and parental access received can be found on a GoogleDoc.

Moodle – there have been a few Moodle queries this month but 3 of the most common ones are asking for a recommendation, asking for a way of doing something and asking for a solution.

• The recommendation was for someone who had experience of networking a number of Moodle’s together … I recommended the North Wales 14-19 Network;
• The way of doing something was for how to embed a web page in a Moodle page … I suggested using a handy piece of code (with the relevant web address inserted) given to me a few years ago that has been very useful: <iframe width=”100%” height=”500″ align=”middle” frameborder=”0″ src=”http://www.rsc-wales.ac.uk” border=”0″></iframe>
• The solution was for a problem a Learning Centre were having regarding how to push news out to their students, rather than expect them to go looking for it … and I recommended the RSS feed for Moodle forums that anyone could then subscribe to.

Facilitating the Moodle-Wales group
As the vice chair of the Moodle-Wales Steering Group, I have the honour of facilitating meetings. Usually the Steering Group meet face to face after one of the Moodle-Wales User Group meetings or via video conference but this time we decided to try something a bit different and we chose to use Skype (the latest beta version that allows up to 5 videos). This meant that we could all meet from our desks rather than having to book and travel to VC studios. It worked surprisingly well for a tool that is in beta.  After the meetings I compile and publish the minutes online and then get on with my actions!

Visits to providers
We try to visit all of our supported learning providers at least once a year to find out what they are up to and how we can help but we also do follow up visits too. The following are some of the real (and virtual) follow up visits I’ve done in the last month:

• Coleg Elidyr to show staff the potential of some of the free, open source applications available via Edu-Apps.
• Coleg Glan Hafren to collect the Turning Point interactive response system set we loaned them, along with feedback about its use.
• Barry College to take them on a virtual tour of our Second Life Office, followed on another day by a face to face session to show them the basics of building in Second Life so that they could borrow some space on the University of Wales Newport, School of Health and Social Sciences island (where our SLOffice is based) to try and engage with learners who won’t engage face to face.
• Coleg Gwent to take a virtual tour of our Second Life Office and the island and later to test (virtually) the Skype (Beta) multi video setup for a session they want to run.

Events
Organising and facilitating events is also another part of my role as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). This month I supported colleagues at the Cardiff  ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ roadshow, which was the last of the series of three roadshows, the other two of which I was much more involved in (‘Barrier Busters, Accessibility and Inclusion‘ and ‘Learner Voice Learner Choice‘). For the last few months I have also been working on organising the one big, cross sector event that we are running in Cardiff on 30th June this year – ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol‘. There are still some places available on this FREE event so if you are interested then you’ll have to be quick and book now!

Virtual communication
We communicate with our learning providers in many different ways but 2 areas I have responsibility for contributing to (as do most of the team) are:

• Twitter – I tweet as@HelenHRSC on a very regular basis but also as @rscwales when it is my turn. As a learning technologist I am constantly on the lookout for news ideas and examples of effective practise and I find that Twitter is an excellent way of sharing what I find quickly … as well as also finding out what others are doing and sharing that too.

• Our teaching and learning (and technology) blog – I managed to blog 3 times last month (twice about Moodle and once about digital communication) but this varies depending on how much I am at my desk and whether I have been inspired to blog and feel I have something worth saying!

Twitter is my first virtual port of call for sharing stuff, followed by our blog and also the news pages on our website.

Keeping up to date and sharing with the team
I use a whole variety of ways to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of education and technology (RSS feeds, Twitter, mailing lists, newsletters, attending events, taking courses,  talking to people … ) and as well as sharing all of this with our supported learning providers I also make sure I share with the team too. A couple of tools that I have come across and shared recently are Twiddla (a bit like Etherpad(as was) but allows images and password protection) and Wallwisher (a web page for sharing ideas and comments that can been used in many ways).

As I said at the beginining, each day is different and this is just a flavour of the things that I am involved with as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). I guess the job is like both education and technology … always something to learn and share … but also ever changing!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

I haven’t blogged for some time because I have been very much taken up with recent JISC RSC Wales roadshows, particularly ‘Barrier Busters – Accessibility and Inclusion’ and ‘Learner Voice, Learner Choice’, both of which have really focused me on the idea of being more inclusive as a matter of course, rather than thinking about ‘accessibility and inclusion’ as something we just bolt on to what we are already doing.

JISC TechDis, who aim to be the leading educational advisory service, working across the UK, in the fields of accessibility and inclusion, believe that with regard to accessibility and inclusion ‘There should be a shift from specific support for disabled people to help them over institutional barriers, to a focus on reducing the institutional barriers in the first place.‘ Having delved deeper into JISC TechDis website and resources I have come to understand this as, that by changing the way you do some straightforward things you can automatically exclude less people from accessing your information, resources and services or put another way, you can be more inclusive.

A few of the key resources that I have been talking about at our events and using more actively to help me change my own practice to become more inclusive are:

Accessibility Essentials – a series of publications (paper, CD and online) about how to make your Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and pdfs more accessible. They have been round for a few years but have been recently updated for Microsoft Office 2007  and the full series can be found online here: www.techdis.ac.uk/accessibilityessentials.

As a result of becoming familiar with the straightforward guidelines in these publications, one of the key things that I have changed is the way I produce Word documents, which (now it is relatively easy to convert a Word document to a pdf) has also affected how accessible my subsequent pdf documents are. The user personalisation of pdfs section of the Accessibility Essentials pdf guide is also very useful if you want to know more about how accessible pdfs really are with their built in text reader, option to change backgound colours and fonts and easy navigation using bookmarks.

The realisation that most of us (without being aware of it) usually create Word docs (and presentations) based on what we like (prefered font styles, sizes, colours etc) not on what will be more inclusive for more learners (as described in the Accessibility Essentials guidelines) has been the key for the changes I have made here.

Portable, open source, free applications (software) have also been around for some time but with the advent of tools like AccessApps (a USB bundle of portable, open source free apps that support learner’s writing, reading and planning, as well as sensory, cognitive and physical difficulties) and subsequently LearnApps (apps specifically designed for learners), TeachApps (apps specifically designed for teachers) and now My Study Bar (see below), which are all bundled together and branded as EduApps, knowing about and accessing these applications (software) is much easier. Two of the newer tools for accessing a range of selected applications are:

• My Study Bar, a floating toolbar that can be used with many applications,  is the latest tool which helps overcome problems that students commonly experience with studying, reading and writing. Amongst other things it incorporates a talking dictionary, a screen tinter, word prediction, a screen reader and mind mapping software.

• JISC TechDis  have also developed their web browser toolbar, which provides a range of productivity and accessibility tools and aids to help users customise the way they view and interact with web pages.

The Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Service (OASES) from JISC TechDis is a tool to help you (or your department or organisation) identify areas of current strength and weakness in your practice in terms of accessibility and inclusion. As part of this tool JISC TechDis have proposed a simple model of ‘accessibility maturity’ to enable you to work out how at risk your organisation is of not meeting learners needs, based on how you already approach accessibility and inclusion. The highest level of risk equates to the organisations that react to learners needs as they happen, whereas the lowest level of risk is associated with working flexibly with learners and others, being prepared and providing a more inclusive experience all of the time anyway, which is where I guess we would all aspire to be.

Finally, if you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into DSpeech (one of the tools available as part of EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file.