Screencast or Animation Video

Analyzing a Student Misconception: Hear from a Math Coach Video

Reflection:

This video will go near the end of module 1, part 1 when learners are reflecting on how they might use what they learned and apply it to classroom instruction. It aligns with CLOs 3 and 4 and supports CLO 1. It will likely follow up an interaction where learners are using pattern blocks to add fractions with unlike denominators and making sense of the units they are working with.

It might feel strange that there are no opening or closing scenes for this video. This particular video is meant to play one part in a multi-media series and there will likely be some text in the LMS that lightly frames this video before the learner hits play. Opening and closing scenes will end up feeling strange on this particular video when it is nestled between some interactions and possibly other videos.

I used YouTube to add closed captioning this time instead of putting it through Synthesia because Synthesia burns in the captioning making it impossible for the user to toggle off captions if they desire. I created a Word doc written script for this video and stuck to it pretty strictly. This allowed me to easily copy-paste my script into the CC feature on YouTube as well as PDF it so I could offer a downloadable  transcript (see link to the left). 

I have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite and decided to try out the Character Animator program. I uses the simple, starter version, not the Pro version for this particular project but in the future, I would like to learn to use Pro because I don't love the look of the character who represents the math coach, nor do I love the background. The Pro version would also allow me to incorporate more diverse features to provide more inclusivity of traditionally marginalized groups. The starter version of Character Animator has very limited options that I was unable to customize without going into the Pro version and I just didn't have time this week to learn to use Pro well enough to accomplish this task. 

I used Synthesia to generate the final video, but I also used Camtasia to add the animated shapes into the video. I had to save the animated video as a MP4, upload it to Camtasia, add in the animated shapes, add in other animations, edit the sound quality to remove background noise, and then export it as a MP4 to so it was ready for Synthesia because I wanted the different AI narrator voice for the rest of the video. I tried manipulating the images of the shapes in Synthesia but there were too many challenges with matching up the appearance of the images with timing of the audio track, which is why I defaulted to using Camtasia. It was a lot of steps across 3 different programs, and that can likely be streamlined, but I defaulted to Camtasia because I know that program well and knew I could be efficient with it. 

Side note in the video- you might notice that the layering of the shapes graphics look a little sloppy. I intentionally left the shapes slightly misaligned because that is exactly what the real blocks look like when students start manipulting them. It's rare that a student has everything perfectly aligned. I wanted some authenticity of how students would put pattern blocks together in real life.