Welcome everyone. This is the official beginning of Ed Web.net’s Using Emerging Technology To Improve Your School Library Program’s sophomore year.

I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor Follett Software Company and our host Ed Web.net for today’s webinar.

For the newcomers, I am Michelle Luhtala, Department Chair at New Canaan High School in New Canaan, CT, which is a free-range media and BYOD school. I blog about that at Bibliotech.me.

If you are Tweeting please include a hash tag #edwebet in your Tweets and if you do Tweet, you can find me at @mluhtala. I am active, but not obsessive.

I do have a couple of announcements for New Englanders. Members of the New England School Library Association are invited to attend

the Massachusetts School Librarians Association (MSLA) face-to-face Institute on August 17, Empowering 21st Century Learners: P21 Framework and AASL Learning Standards. Registration costs $95.00, and it will be held in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

which coincidentally is the day of our next webinar. How to Enlist (and Keep) Volunteers: Students and Parents, and Out of the Box Ideas for "Stretched" Librarians. I will be broadcasting from there, tucked away in a little room.

Also, there is an edCamp coming up in August 18 in Connecticut in Simsbury. If you live anywhere else, please check for an edCamp near you at http://edcamp.wikispaces.com.

If you’ve never been to an edCamp, you should! They are amazingly fun. They are free, casual, and rejuvenating on more levels than I can say.

There is no planned agenda. It evolves as the day unfolds. A huge blank schedule is posted, you can post a topic you’d like to converse about, then everything gets shuffled around and the dust settles after about an hour, and you go off to converse with awesome colleagues about things that interest you. It is completely participant driven, and consequently very democratic. Try one, you won’t belive how much fun it is. Oh, and be sure not to make plans afterwards, because people usually go out to continue their conversations.

I am the co-chair of the CoSN awards committee, and our committee new fresh blood. CoSN is the Consortium of School Networking, and it is largely an association of Chief Technology Officers and Directors of Technology. It is not an organization that librarians tend to gravitate towards, and yet it is one where librarian representation has a powerful impact. We are particularly interested in members who come from states that have CoSN chapters: Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, & Texas. This is a unique leadership opportunity, and the work is not terribly overwhelming. Please get in touch if you are interested. Thanks

Also, we have an exciting collaborative charge. Our own edWeb.net founder and C.E.O. Lisa Shmucki has been in touch with the U.S. Department of Education, and they have charged us to put together a survey about the impact of filtering on student learning. I have some ideas about that, and I opened a discussion thread to collect ideas, so I would love to hear what you want to know. If you have any suggestions for questions, or anything at all, please jump in and participate in the project.

Finally, I opened another thread about teacher evaluation and professional growth systems in your districts. What is your district doing to acknowledge your participation here or in other online professional development. Is there any special dispensation you receive in recompense? Can you, for example, waive an observation? Is there any recognition at all? Or is all your work here “extra”, s to speak? What happens when you submit those certificates of participation? Who do you submit them to? These are all questions I have been pondering. I would love to hear your thoughts!

If you are new to edweb.net, you can view all previous webinars@EdWeb.net/emergingtech. Just scroll down and check under Season 1 – Freshman Year. If you have joined us via some other announcement, like my blog, please join the edWeb.net/emerging tech community at http://edweb.net/emergingtech

Today we are going to talk about video instruction in library programs.

My road to video instruction was a circuitous one, and I share my journey in the hopes, that if you aren’t yet videocasting, this might save you some aggravating steps. I wanted to deliver our monthly newsletter in a more 21st century-friendly format than print. Students were my intended audience. In 2008, I started creating podcasts.

There was a problem though. I didn't like podcasting. In truth, I subscribed to a lot of podcasts that I didn't listen to. Why would students be any different? Why would they go to the trouble of subscribing to, downloading and listening to conversations about our program? It quickly became apparent that it made no sense for me to spend time creating something even I wouldn't consume.

From watching my daughter on Facebook and just basic developmental awareness, I knew how much kids like to see images, not recordings of themselves. So I figured the best way to get them to consume library podcasts was to a) make them visual, and b) only feature students.

So I bought a flip cam (they are no longer in production) and started recording students. Then I tried to create a video podcast. But it took a lot of time! More time than I was willing or able to give. What I could do was to record and publish snippets of library learning.

Kids reading

Kids Learning

Kids collaborating

Kids talking about learning

I wasn't really sure what to do with all my accumulated footage because I didn't really want to edit it all. So I just started posting it on our Facebook page, and kids definitely liked that.

I wasn't really sure what to do with all my accumulated footage because I didn't really want to edit it all. So I just started posting it on our Facebook page, and kids definitely liked that.

So once I got into the habit of publishing video of students at work, it occurred to me to start publishing teacher’s teaching.

For obvious reasons, namely to save myself time, but also because I was short on volunteers, I started recording my own instruction. It quickly became the apparent that nothing could be more boring to watch than a video of a librarian lecturing students about research & bibliographies. Duh! No one was going to watch that. So I began to explore other options. And I started experimenting with screencasting software – you know: video of what you are doing on the computer.

Some of my earliest videos were awful! I started screencasting in SmartBoard’s notebook. Did I mention that this was three years ago? SmartBoard’s recording application has since improved. But back then, my first tutorial was impossible to see by the time it got to YouTube.

Here is a demonstration of how to record in the SmartNotebook software. It’s really easy. That, by the way was recorded in ScreenFlow, which I will talk about later. SmartBoard videos export as .mov files and they are a cinch to upload to

YouTube

Vimeo (great quality – my personal favorite)

Facebook

Twitter

Goolge Video

TeacherTube

I wanted to create better quality videos so I started experimenting with free screencasting tools

Here are the most common free screecasting tools – I got this all from Mashable, by the way. The link is in the Diigo list.

For Windows, there is AviScreen, which creates .avi files and does not capture audio. There is also CamStudio, which does feature audio and also creates .avi files For Mac users, there is Copernicus, which is super quick, but does not support audio. The for both platforms, there is Jing, which is pretty versatile, it features a selection tool so you don’t have to capture your whole screen, you can annotate your images, and it offers free hosting, and provides a URL you can send to others. Screencast-O-Matic, which does not require downloads and offers free hosting. Wink is versatile in terms of file output format.

I will pause here to talk about movie file extensions. Please forgive me if this is familiar territory. I am focusing on the most basic file types. Windows users will generally use .avi files and .wmv files. Mac users will generate .mov files, but also .mp4 files which are not Windows compatible

This is a common mistake folks new to iMovie will make. In iMovie, you can upload directly to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, MoblieMe and Pocast Producer,

but if you want to embed the file into a PowerPoint, or play it on a Windows computer, you will need to convert it to a .mov file, but it is much easier to simply export it as a QuickTime file.

If you forget that step though, my favorite file conversion site is Zamzar.com Personally, of the free tools, I liked Jing the best. It’s versatile, but it does require a download. So it depends on your needs, if you just want to get it done super fast, Screencast-O-Matic is fine (except for its name). Alright. Is this getting too technical? Back to my story:

As my Follett friends will attest, I am demanding of my software, and I soon reached a point when I wanted more features than the free tools provided, so I started shopping around for commercial products. I could go into a log discourse about all that is out there, but a) that would be boring, b) I haven’t’ really tried that many of them because they cost money, so I won’t. There are links in the Diigo list though that will give you some overviews and comparisons.

I have used two commercial products: Camtasia Studios, which is available for a free trial, it is now available for both Mac and Windows though that took a while, and if it is anything like my favorite TechSmith product,

SnagIt – a screen capture tool I have been using throughout this presentation, it takes a while for the Mac version to catch up with the Windows one. It is made by TechSmith, and

it costs money, $99 for Mac and $179 for Windows – as I said the Mac version is limited in comparison. Educator rates are discounted. It’s a really spiffy product. I don’t use it often because I only have the windows version, and I seldom use my Windows machine – in fact I only use it when I need Camtasia, Outlook, or Explorer. In any event, I really do like it.

I use ScreenFlow. It is a Telestream product. It costs $99 Dollars, and it is only available for Mac. I hate the textbox function, but ScreenFlow offers one feature I absolutely love. It simultaneously records you, using your webcam, and your on screen activity. This, for me, is the beauty of the product. You can do this in Camtasia Studio5, but it is not nearly as simple. I included a link to a tutorial on how to do this in the Diigo list.

This delivery is ideal for instruction because you can break up the lesson from technical to personal. I just finished reading My Twitter book club, #ecbc1, second installment of John Medina's Brain Rules. Yes, I belong to a Twitter book club, and you can join us! We will discuss rules 5 and 6 next Monday. Please Tweet me if you are interested.

So back to video instruction: In his fourth chapter, the one on attention, Medina talks about designing lectures. And he verifies something most educators have long intuited, which is that you’ve got seconds to grab someone's attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. At nine minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done to retain the attention and restart the clock-something emotional and relevant. And that’s where this feature is brilliant. Just when you start boring your audience with learning, you can throw in a personal anecdote and make a human connection, albeit in video form.

Here is a not-so brilliant example, of what I mean about breaking up a video from screencasting to personal message – not an anecdote, per se, but something to which students will connect emotionally – “earn you points rather than cost you points.” This video reviews how to format bibliographies, and it is way too long, which brings me to another point.

In ScreenFlow, you can incorporate other media like sound, still images, or other video files. In this one, I took a screenshot on an iPad to show students how to access and use eBooks from different vendors. But you can see how your recording generates essentially two lines, which I have chopped up and reorganized in the editing process.

For student tutorials, the video should run no longer than 2 minutes. Now this is a rule I break all the time, but less and less often these days, because kids will NOT watch anything longer, so really – what’s the point? And truthfully, teachers won’t watch anything longer either. Actually, neither will I.

There are exceptions to the rule. If a teacher wants me to work with a class, and I am not going to be in school, or if I am already booked to co-teach another class, then I can make a tutorial of the lesson, upload it and allow the teacher to stream it in class. If bandwidth is an issue, one could just give them the teacher the file and let them play it in class. Time consuming? Depends on the lesson. Worth it? Absolutley because….

The next time I need to teach that lesson, I have an option: I can teach it in person, or not! Sometimes, I let the teacher show the video, and then I show up and advise students individually once they start working hands-on. Honestly, it makes my job more fun, it shows students, who, by the way, are just as likely to tune me out as they do the video, that there is a 24/7 resource they can consult when they need it. And when they need it is when they WON’T tune out the video. It also puts some pressure on the classroom teacher to master the content. Teachers kind of freak out when kids ask questions during the video, so it suddenly becomes incumbent upon them to pay attention, rather than to correct papers.

So here is an example of one of those videos:

That one, about in-text citations, is made with ScreenFlow, but I used SnagIt, screen capture software and ditched the entire screencast in the timeline. Basically, what that means is that I used stills instead of video for the computer part, but I put my face in more often than usual to reconnect with the audience. In this image, I embedded a Prezi presentation, by screencasting the prezi show, saving it as a .mov, then importing it into this video. I also used other footage that was taken last year for another project altogether. The result is in the Diigo list – it was my candidate’s statement for the AASL election.

One thing about this video, is I sound bored. I was tired, and it showed. I produce roughly 30 videos per school year, and I seldom feel that they turn out how I want them to, but I am more about quantity than quality, and in truth, they become obsolete so fast, that I have to redo them rather frequently. All my Destiny videos are already out of date. There have been two version upgrades since I made most of them. Don’t get me wrong: that's great for the program and our patrons, but I need to update our tutorials.

Now here’s where these tutorials come in really handy. My colleague Chris and I teach 4 consecutive lessons to 17 sections of freshman health classes in the fall. That’s 68 lessons, often as many as six in a day, and this is on top of our collaborative instruction in other disciplines. To do that in stand-and-deliver mode is tedious & boring for us. More importantly, it delivers comparatively inconsistent instruction (first v. sixth lesson of the day) to students, and it fails to take into account their learning pace and styles. Now, we create the lesson video, include it in the lesson courseware, and schedule the class in a lab. Kids come in. log into the courseware, put on headphones, start watching and learning at their own pace. Chris and I are on hand to support students as needed. Some kids watch the whole way through, others stop, practice, and proceed.

shown it in Emerging Tech before, so feel free to take a peek if you want to later. So by the start of the 2010, I was starting to make solid tutorial videos, but then I heard Buffy Hamilton speak at the Connecticut Association of School Librarians’ preconference. And she talked about how she was using video to get students to engage in the conversation about learning. That was an Ahah! moment for me. I was using video to voice my teaching, but I also needed to use video to give students a voice. That was my whole intention in the first place, wasn’t it? The tutorials were a digression from my original plan, which was to document learning. That’s when I started recording kids in earnest.

These are more boring that some of the cuter videos I post on my blog, but it really gives students and teachers a chance to reflect on what is really being learned. That conversation about recognizing bias turned into a follow-p discussion and a rubric for using Twitter as a vehicle for research. It helped me inform my instruction, and it elucidated for students when they were just making stuff up. They knew. They really did.

And then of course, with video, you can embed it in student publications like this Paper.Li, which aggregates our students’ social studies Tweets with links that include the hashtag #ncramsss.

And finally, if you model effective use of video for teaching and learning, students turn out pretty powerful video of their own

As a final note on video, the New England School Library Association hosted a leadership conference in April, and Nancy Dowd, the Director of Marketing for the New Jersey State Library was our speaker. The day’s theme was advocacy, and Nancy walked us through a story telling activity. Chris and I chose to tell our story in video. Here it is:

I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor Follett Software Company and our host Ed Web.net for today’s webinar.

For the newcomers, I am Michelle Luhtala, Department Chair at New Canaan High School in New Canaan, CT, which is a free-range media and BYOD school. I blog about that at Bibliotech.me.

If you are Tweeting please include a hash tag #edwebet in your Tweets and if you do Tweet, you can find me at @mluhtala. I am active, but not obsessive.