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.

These days it seems that students have become huge consumers of technology but in many ways that is where their interaction ends. To many it is not important to know how something works as long as it does the job. Whilst the use of word-processing and spreadsheet software is an essential skill, the UK is facing a shortage of people who have the knowledge to develop new software be it for business use or for gaming.

The Royal Society published a report last year which shows a fall of 33% in just three years in ICT GCSE students, a fall of 33% in six years in A level ICT and 57% in eight years in A level Computing students in England and similar declines found elsewhere in the UK.

David Braben who has been at the forefront of games design for years recently addressed the Learning without Frontiers conference, “Every kid I talk to says that ICT is dull. They hate it, the majority is learning how to use certain MS tools and how to find the on and off switch”.

David is a key figure in a project called The Raspberry Pi foundation which is developing a small computer which will make computing affordable for everyone. The USB stick sized device sports an HDMI port to connect to a TV and a USB port to allow it to be connected to peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse. It will be available with open source software such as Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice and Python which will allow students to get to grips with the basis of programming.

The amazing thing is that Raspberry Pi is expected to cost as little as £10 which will mean that a basic computer will be affordable for everyone. The cost of computers has been a problem for many schools and colleges and this has often meant that ICT education has been confined to ICT labs; the Raspberry Pi will mean that students could actually take their work home with them.

For more information about The Raspberry Pi foundation, you can visit www.raspberrypi.org

JISC RSC Wales’ Esther Barrett describes her experiences using iGoogle and how she has at last given up her paper diary! About time too…

At the RSC we are regularly pointing out web based tools that can be used to enhance teaching and learning. A lot of sites and tools on the internet are available for free, some of them charge for an enhanced version with more features and facilities but for obvious reasons we try to focus on the free ones.

With the recent news that the social bookmarking site Delicious and the video communications tool Skype have just been sold to other organisations it’s important to look at what can happen to services on the web that we are relying on for day to day activities.
In the above cases we aren’t likely to see too much in the way of change in the near future, Yahoo are in the process of transferring Delicious to AVOS (set up by the founders of YouTube) and are currently asking Delicious users for permission to transfer their details to the new owners. AVOS haven’t revealed their plans for Delicious yet but they say it’ll be business as usual for a while as they work on enhancements for the service. For enhancements I read “finding a way to make money from the service”, something that Yahoo didn’t really manage to do. I don’t expect Delicious to become a subscription based service but I do think that some sort of link to advertising or statistics gathering system is in the pipeline.

In my opinion the purchase of Skype by Microsoft is a very interesting development, Microsoft and Skype both have a huge user base and there are many exciting possibilities ahead for the service, as it gets integrated into more devices like MS Windows based smartphones and tablets. Imagine Skype running on an Xbox 360 with their Kinect system, Skype would be able to recognise the user that walked into the room, log them into their account and enable them to video conference from their home, office or classroom. The current version of Skype is also available on many more platforms and devices than just Windows based ones (Linux, Apple, i-Phone, Android) and must be one of the most widespread cross platform communication applications available.

Of course it isn’t all good news, some web based services just disappear or become so useful that they are bought by another company and become a subscription only service. The model that a lot of these new technologies works on relies on their success and popularity, they need to have a large user base to have value so they are funded by venture capitalist organisations, developed, and often plan to run at a financial loss for a number of years to allow this to happen.

We have to bear these issues in mind when we are planning to deploy services that rely on web based tools, what will happen if they disappear, start charging or increase their prices? In many cases the changes will benefit the users but if a tool is discontinued or becomes too expensive how will that affect your service and your learners?

I have blogged several times recently about using technology to meet and communicate, present and collaborate synchronously, with ‘Whatever the weather – an illuminating few months’ and  ‘Is face to face the only answer?‘ being the most recent. As interest in using web based technologies for synchronous/live/real time communication increases, knowing more about the range of tools that are out there, especially the lower cost/free ones is becoming more important.

Today I had the opportunity to attend a demonstration of one of the open source technologies I have tried before (with mixed success) but that I seem to be hearing mentioned more and more often … Big Blue Button.  JISC Mail (another of the JISC Advance services) recently set up a Big Blue Button (BBB) installation in their JISC Mail Lab and today offered a demonstration for anyone who was interested. I went along (well sat at my desk with my headset on and joined in) with about 35 other people to see what it was all about and here is what I found out:

What BBB had:

• 1 presenter (who we could see and hear) and 1 moderator who we knew was there via text chat
• multiple webcams displaying a number of the participants
• a presentation / whiteboard area (but only for the presenter to annotate)
• text chat where messages could be posted to all or privately to any number of individuals
• a demonstration of the presenter sharing their screen.

What BBB didn’t have:

• tools for encouraging audience participation or gauging how the sessions are going … emoticons / hands up / polls …
• a file sharing option or the ability to save the presentation
• a recording feature … which would have been very handy in this case as those from the JISC RSC Wales team who couldn’t attend the session could have viewed it at their leisure and I could perhaps have even put a link to it here (like we do with our Lunchtime Bytes).

What impressed me about BBB:

• the number of webcams that we had running at one time
• that (as a participant) I could control the size and position of each of the elements (presentation board, web cams, text chat) and that I could also close most of them if I wanted to
• there was the option to translate the text chat into various other languages, using Google translate
• you could colour your text chat to more easily distinguish it from other’s text (little things …I know)!

What disappointed me about BBB:

• audio wasn’t automatically activated when you entered the session and you had to know to click on a particular icon to activate it
• I couldn’t save the whiteboard/presentation and so had to take screenshots all the way through
• apparently a built in system for setting up and sending out instructions for joining a session is not part of BBB.

Overall impression of Big Blue Button …

At the moment Big Blue Button wouldn’t be suitable for something like our online Lunchtime Byte interactive, information sessions, currently delivered via Elluminate, because these sessions use the features (missing from BBB) that allow greater feedback and participation from the audience (emoticons, polls) as well as the recording feature. However, I like the simplicity of Big Blue Button’s interface and the flexibility for the participants to decide how they have their view laid out, as well as the fact that multiple webcams seem to run very easily … not something I have seen done well by many/any tools before. I think that Big Blue Button would be a very handy tool for geographically distributed groups of people who wanted to meet live online and have the ability to see and hear each other talk, as well as the option to share a presentation or document in a central space and also to have text chat as an alternative way of communicating.

One last thing … I haven’t mentioned anything here about the technical side of Big Blue Button but the Big Blue Button website or  JISC Mail’s Lab will hopefully be able to continue to offer advice and support about all aspects of this synchronous communication tool that, after today’s demonstration (thank you JISC Mail!) does appear to have potential.

Over the last couple of weeks JISC RSC Wales have been involved with 2 activities where we have used our text wall and have, as a result, learnt a lot from the text messages that have been sent to it. The things we have learnt include finding out more about how and where students prefer to learn and also about which technologies are being used in the classroom and beyond. Now I’m sure that we ‘learnt a lot from text messages’ isn’t something that I would have written a few years ago … but I am thrilled to be writing it now! As with many examples of effective use of technology, the text wall wasn’t used in isolation; it was just used to provided the respondees some thinking time, having been asked a question, and a chance for them all to share their initial thoughts ready for a discussion with everyone. The questions asked and some of the responses we got are below:

… was asked as of a number of Yale College students who were taking part in a Learning Space Design session for the college. Their answers included:

• I learn best at home sitting at the dining room table using paper and pens and text books
• Sat in my bedroom with music and coffee
• I learn best in the classroom then if I have any questions I am able to ask
• I learn in a hands on way, like experiments and acting out a situation
• Quiet. At a table. With coffee
• I work best when I’m in a group
• with some epic tunes, even classical.. relaxing

The discussions that followed revealed more about each of the comments and that, unsuprisingly really, the students didn’t all like to learn in the same way. An interesting comment from one of student was that ‘boring powerpoints’ and not being allowed to ask questions didn’t help learning but that participation and fun activities did!

The delegates of our ‘Advance and Enhance – beyond the classroom‘ roadshow were asked, as part of the introduction:
Their answers included:

In the classroom:

• video, slide shows, audience response systems
• video conferencing
• whiteboard
• Moodle, internet access, Email, Twitter, chatrooms, audio
• Powerpoint

Out of the classroom:

• mobile phone, text messaging, wireless access, Moodle, Facebook, lecture streaming/capture
• iTunes U
• Wimba Voice – a voice discussion board, voice e-mail
• blogs, wikis
• Google docs for collaboration
• e-portfolios
• VLE

Between organisations:

• Skype conferencing to develop best practice, Moodle,Twitter, email, wikis
• VLE, webinars, Social Media, Facebook, email, intranet / internet space, wikis
• instant messaging (e.g msn)
• video conferencing
• Adobe Connect, Elluminate,  discussion boards

The discussions that followed revealed that some are using technology more than others and that although some use is organiation wide, some is still quite small scale.  At the end of the roadshow most delegates said that they had learnt something new from the sessions that followed the discussion. For more about what was covered in these sessions visit: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/advanceandenhance

The example use of text messaging above is only one way that text messaging can be used to support teaching and learning and a previous blog, ‘To txt or not to txt … that is the question‘,  includes a link to a document of how others in education are using text walls and a link to another document giving more information about the types of text messaging services that are currently being used within education.

Although I am sure that we would have had good discussions in both of the situations above without using the text wall, I think (hope) that in these cases the technology actually enabled everyone to feel that what they had to say was important and gave them all a chance to share.

Last month I blogged about an illuminating few months, where I had been using the web conferencing tool Elluminate in a number of ways. In that blog post I mentioned a range of web conferencing  / synchronous communication and collaboration tools and said that I would blog about them in more detail at a later date … well here I am!

Yesterday saw the first of our JISC RSC Wales roadshows for 2011. ‘Advance and Enhance‘ is about looking beyond the classroom  at how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and also at a distance. My part in the roadshow is a session on synchronous communcations, which is entitled ‘Is face to face the only answer?‘ and which is about teaching and learning in real time using technology to break down barriers of location, time, money, weather …

As I am sure you will have guessed, ‘Is face to face the only answer?’ is really a rhetorical question, which I’m sure that most would agree the answer to is ‘no, it can’t be’ when refering to teaching and learning, especially when considering that most learning providers are aiming to reach more students regardless of location, to save money and time, to be as inclusive as possible for learners with disabilities or difficulties accessing physical learning environments and, as mentioned in my previous post, to not allow the weather to disrupt the teaching and learning. So, if face to face can’t be the only answer, how can technology help?

In preparation for my session at the roadshow and because it is increasingly an area of interest to the learning providers we support and as a way for us to deliver our service more flexibly, the JISC RSC Wales team have been looking at a range of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that are currently available and being used already in education by a number of organisations. As a geographically distributed team we use a range of synchronous communication tools because we can’t be face to face a lot of the time. With regard to the service we offer we have had to look at different ways of delivering face to face sessions (like the roadshows) because of the reasons mentioned above (geography of our audience and the team, cost, time …). As a consequence we have come up with a way of using technology to deliver bite sized chunks of information in real time to you at your desk in the form of our ‘Lunchtime Bytes’ series of online events, delivered via Elluminate. It is our experiences with Elluminate that have informed our informal evaluations of a range of other web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools, which I can now share with you via an information and resources area in our Moodle at: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/webconferencing

This online area contains a database of the web conferencing / synchronous communication and collaboration tools that we have looked at so far. We hope to expand this as we are able to evaluate more of these tools but for now it contains our thoughts and experiences of Elluminate, vRoom, Adobe Connect Pro, Nefsis, DimDim, Big Blue Button, vYew, EVO and Skype. As you will see, there are a mix of paid for, free and open source alternatives. Some of the tools are aimed at business and some at education. Some of the tools are more suitable for formal delivery or meetings and others are more suited for informal communication and collaboration. The online area also looks at why you might want to use this technology as well as what you might use it for and also how others are using it already.

As I said when I shared this with the delegates at our roadshow, our part in all of this is to let you (the teaching and learning experts)  know what tools (technology) is out there and to suggest how it could potentially help your organisation, its staff, learners and partners to communicate and collaborate in real time, even if you can’t be face to face. Whilst always considering the teaching and learning, the focus has been on the technology but then, as suggested today in this post by James Clay ‘you have to start from somewhere and by explaining the potential that learning technologies offer, you are starting from a good place that will open minds to future potential and possibilities‘

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!

With this having been my second time at a ‘Future of Technology in Education‘ event I was much more prepared and so I didn’t attend FOTE10 (last Friday) expecting to come away with answers about the future! What I did come away with though are a number of ideas to investigate further and several questions to ponder…

Is it an exciting or a scary future?

Ray Fleming from Microsoft talked about a future vision where technology was everywhere and used for eveything. James Alliban from Skive talked about augmented reality and the directions it could take. James Clay suggested iPads could be the catalyst for changing books and reading quite radically (more than ebooks or ebook readers). This is potentially a very exciting future if technology engages you but a scary one if it doesn’t :-S

Does everything have to be enhanced?

Jeremy Speller from UCL challenged the idea of mobile learning, suggesting that mobile devices were just replacing existing ways of doing stuff not enhancing the learning experience. Hugh Griffiths from oMbiel asked how we could provide learners with the mobile (learning) experience theyexpect; according to research they have done, at the moment learners just want to use mobile technology to change the way stuff is presented to them, like timetables, campus maps and library information. Does all technology have to enhance everything, isn’t it ok to use it just to make a learner’s life easier?

Are we redefining the role of the teacher?

Ollie Bray (Learning and Teaching, Scotland) suggested that teachers are architects of learning, which I interpreted as teachers carefully constructing the environment in which learning can happen, making available all of the essential bits but leaving room for the learner to make it their own. He talked specifically about using commercial games to engage learners and enable learning, with the teacher structuring the experience and guiding the learners through. Ollie also asked whether it really mattered if children aren’t always aware of exactly what they are learning  … they think they are just having fun while playing a game, whereas the teacher has actually structured the learning experience so that they are, for example, collecting data for later analysis, collaborating to solve a problem or even motivating themselves to persevere and improve their own performance. If we learn (in a structured way) and enjoy it, does it matter how it happens?

Enthusiasm for technology is good BUT are we all really as digitally literate as we should be?

Miles Metcalfe (consultant) pointed out to us all that although using geolocation technology in education can be a very positive experience, we should remember that for many organisations we are ‘the product’, with the data we generate and share being used by these commercial organisations for their own benefit. Whilst being optimistic and creative about the use of technology to support teaching and learning, we all need to be aware of this bigger picture so that we can at least make informed choices and particularly so that this can be passed on to others, especially the learners. Are we all really as digitally literate as we should be?

Open source is about more than ‘free’ and is this what we want for education?

Miles Berry from Roehampton University extolled the benefits of open source and suggested that the characteristics of open source are, in fact, what we might want our education system to be like; that is:

• a collaborative experience
• community based
• modular approach
• tinkering enabled (bricolage)
• innovative culture
• money saving

Does this describe our education system today … and if it doesn’t do we want it to be like this?

Engaging teachers who don’t want to be engaged – is there an answer?

Matt Lingard from LSE asked us why teachers, despite having access to more technology than ever today and expertise and support to help them use it, still don’t choose to use technology to support teaching and learning. The quick poll he conducted suggested ‘fear’ and ‘lack of confidence’ as just two of the reasons but there were more. This is the real challenge isn’t it, finding the answer to why all teachers don’t engage with technology, in order that we can all move forward together?

I think that the main message that I took away fom FOTE10 was that it really isn’t about us and what we know or used to do or want to do, it’s about what the future could possibly be and attempting to prepare the young people today for this future. However, we can’t really predict the future (of anything, never mind technology in education) but it is certainly an interesting experience considering the possibilities!

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is the second FOTE event I have attended and although I got lots out of the first event I don’t think I was as prepared as I could have been, so in case anyone reading is planning on attending FOTE11 here are my tips for getting the most out of the event:

• Go with an open mind
• Be prepared to listen
• Take the chance to reflect and reconsider
• Accept that you won’t come away with answers, just possibilities.

(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).