Dartfish Users Conference Engaging The Video Generation

I was invited to present at the Dartfish users conference at Bedford University. I had 2 inputs to the day and was able to attend some of the other sharing practice sessions. Yet again I picked up some more tips, short cuts and uses of some of the more advanced features. You can view my first presentation via slideshare below

After my presentation I attended a couple of sessions led by Neil Melville which were excellent the first was about sharing analyser projects and the second was about using the measurement and data tools. You can learn more about using the measurement tools and data tables in this online tutorial. There are some more online tutorials on some of the other Dartfish features available here.

My second presentation was all about extending learning beyond the classroom through the use of online spaces and tools. I promised the delegates that they would not have to take any notes (other than the address of this blog) as I would write about my presentation and post links to everything I made reference to through the blog. I deliberately set out not to use a PowerPoint presentation as I wanted to demonstrate that you can deliver your content through other vehicles. I also wanted the delegates to return to my blog to experience for themselves what I was trying to get across i.e. you can extend the learning and the engagement with your learners beyond the restrictions of the actual lesson/presentation. By coming back to the blog the delegates have the opportunity to: read this post and reflect, click on the links to learn more and do further research or post comments to me thus extending the impact of the conference and this is exactly what our pupils doing in a number of schools. If you are a conference delegate welcome back if not read on anyway you might find something that engages you.

I was conscious that my workshop had a slant towards PE and not every delegate was from a PE or sports background, but all that I talked to could be replicated for any subject. I started by visiting the Learning and Teaching Scotland PE website and directed the group towards this case study about using blogs and wikis as there are links to videos and tutorials on how to set up a blog and information about wikis. 

I then introduced the wonderful free  web tool delicious to create online book marks for sites that you find interesting and useful it can then be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection. For a simple guide watch the video below (You probably will be unable to view the video in school as it is hosted on YouTube). You may find my PE bookmarks  useful. You may want to consider setting this up for your course or in a department to tag interesting sites or share frequently visited sites with pupils and or staff. This can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.

 

I moved on to talk about Blogs for those of you who want to know a bit more about blogging I previously posted this video explaining blogging in simple terms . If you want to give blogging a go check out this set of tutorials for using wordpress the provider I use for this blog. If you look on the “links” section on the left hand side near the top of the page I have links to several PE blogs that you may find interesting.

The main point I was trying to establish is that blogs can provide a fantastic conduit for communication and collaboration with your learners. You can extend the learning beyond the confines of the lesson. Your learners can communicate with you leave you questions or work to look over etc and you can deal with these communications wherever you can get online. At this point I  spoke about RSS feeds and aggregators. You may find this video on using RSS feeds useful. The aggregator I demonstrated was netvibes a great bit of software to keep track of all blogs and websites that have content which is regularly updated. I find netvibes very useful as there are loads of plug ins that you can add and you can personalise it to your own needs and the best bit is that it is web based so if you sign up for your own account you can access it form any computer with an Internet connection. Ideal for use at home and school. Here is a video  about netvibes 

The next part of the presentation focused on wikis the following video (also on YouTube) will help you understand a little more about what a wiki is.

I used the Banchory H/Int2 wiki and explained that the content was there for people to download and use and share as long as they were willing to reciprocate and acknowledge the source. Yet again I was trying to demonstrate how we can use an online tool to extend the learning experience and provide additional support.  Wikis can also offer real scope for collaboration between teachers for resource development and between teachers and pupils for learning. I explained that teachers can sign up for free wikis that are advert free at wikispaces. Wikispaces also has video tutorials to help get you started within their help section.

When I was discussing the wikis I highlighted using Youtube to incorporate inspirational and interesting videos. There is actually a lot of very good content on Youtube and other video hosting sites such as google video. We use the videos as a hook for the pupils and also to make the wiki more attractive and lastly to engage the children though adopting a piece of their own culture. Our pupils are creating their own environments outside school with video, audio text and many other applications in sites such as bebo and myspace and facebook and we want our wiki to reflect some of that cool. I also demonstrated  Youtube annotation showing how value can be added to your you tube videos. This is the direction that Dartfish are moving through the Dartfish Moves platform where you can upload and annotate videos. I was gutted that I had to leave early and could not see the presentation on Datfish moves. Something else for you to check out is the Dartfish channel on YouTube.

I punctuated my first presentation in the morning with videos I had saved to my computer from YouTube using Zamzar. This is a very useful tool as most schools block video sharing sites or you may want to play a video on a laptop in an area with no access to an Internet connection. This article form Wired explains explains some other ways of saving videos to your computer. I like Zamzar as you can save videos to your computer in different formats and you can convert videos to different formats, it can also be used to convert many different types of files and documents from one type to another.

I hope you find this a useful summary of the day and i hope it continues your learning beyond my presentation. Please feel free to post comments about the day or ask further questions for clarification.