Tag: video

Photoshop… still the best for GIFs

Tutorial: Create an animated GIF from a series of photos

I’ve tried some so-called, purpose-built GIF apps like GIF Brewery 3 and Photoshop is still the best for creating compact, quality GIFs. It gives me the most control, but there are a lot of additional steps and things to confuse those new to Photoshop.

I still have to consider the pedagogical application of when to best use a GIF. You have to consider your audience. The size, quality, and timing all play into whether the work I am creating will be effective. I made the GIF below for the director of my office, but chose to send static images because I had to get the information to her quickly and didn’t want to confuse her with how I formatted the information.

Walk through of viewing the Revision History on a WordPress page

Related:

  1. Using GIFs of Screencasts, 10/24/19
  2. MOV to GIF, 2/23/16

Additional: to make a screen capture of a specific window on a Mac, click the space bar after pressing command-shift-4 and then position the camera icon over the window you would like to capture and then click the mouse

Just-in-Time Videos

There are a variety of ways to capture and publish just-in-time videos for use in class. Some factors when considering different options are: ease of use, PSU support, time to deploy, editing options, storage options, etc.

Related

Video Copyright and Licensing for Instructional Designers Training

I attended an online training, “Copyright for Instructional Designers” (scroll down the page) provided by Ana Enriquez on the very complex topic of copyright when it comes to video content, but not limited to just video.

Poll results to the question, "Which of the following performances would be considered 'public' under U.S. copyright law? Playing a movie in a dorm common area for a group [71%]. Playing a movie in a Libraries space at an event sponsored by a student organization [96%]. Streaming a movie on a Canvas course website (behind authentication) [43%]. Playing a movie during a class session of a... [57%]."

My main take-aways:

  • Contact Ana (aee32@psu.edu) or Brandy Karl (bak25@psu.edu) with questions
  • Do your due diligence to follow the laws while working on a project for PSU, there may be some protections under PSU Policy IP05 but don’t count on it because there is some specific language about “system users”
  • There are three sections of Copyright law that we use
    • Fair Use (107)
    • Classroom use (110-1)
    • TEACH Act (110-2)
  • We only need to qualify for one of these sections, not all three
  • The laws may not and do not make common sense, but that’s not important, what is important is to try and understand how they work – and this is why I am not a lawyer

Digital Pedagogy Video Guide Presentation

April Millet and I have been asked to present at the Feb 12 Faculty Development series being hosted by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. Chris Gamrat has been working with others to plan these faculty development sessions at various locations around University Park. I the sessions are also being shared and recorded via Zoom.

April and I will be discussing the pedagogical applications of video. We worked together to build an online resource for the University.

INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO GUIDE: Best practices for creating pedagogically appropriate video – https://instructionalvideoguide.psu.edu/

Recording Lectures using Zoom

When teaching online, blended, flipped classes, or preparing for class cancelations, recording your lectures can be an extremely useful technique.

I recommend using Zoom since Penn State has a license for all faculty, staff, and students. If you have any technical questions, you can contact the Helpdesk for assistance.

Here is a list of steps and related best practices:

  1. Quiet space
    1. Do not disturb signs
    2. Let others know that you’ll be recording
    3. Turn off notifications and silence your devices
  2. Prepare
    1. Plug in and test your headset or microphone
    2. Download the Zoom desktop client
    3. Adjust your Preferences
      1. Cloud Recording preferences overview
      2. Adjust recording preferences
        1. Check “Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor” option
        2. Check “Audio transcript” option
    4. Record
      1. Consider chunking your presentations down into natural sub-topics
      2. Switch to Presentation-mode if you are sharing your slides
      3. For first recordings or when recording in a new space, record only a minute or so and check that recording to make sure everything looks good before recording your entire video
    5. Share
      1. Zoom will send you email notification(s) when your cloud recording is done processing
      2. Access your recordings
      3. Copy the Share link and distribute it to your students

Please contact the Office of Learning Design or check out the online web resources with questions.

Media for INTAF 897: Deception and Counter-Deception

The following are some materials gathered for Col. Jacob Graham’s (ret. USMC) INTAF 897 course. These 3 particular subjects were mentioned in Malcom Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know.”

Go to this Sway

Accessibility

None of the images or videos have been QA’d for accessibility at this time. Updates will be posted here. Given that this Sway is only a draft, accommodations like transcripts will be developed on an “as needed” basis.

Sway

Sway has some nice media features and makes adding images and video relatively easy, although there are some limitations.

  • To add media, click on the “+” > “Media” tab > choose the form of media.
  • It doesn’t seem possible to preview the media within Sway, so I previewed videos in YouTube.
  • For the videos I wanted to use, I copied-pasted the URL in Sway’s Media Search field to display the exact video I was looking for.
  • Sway doesn’t natively display the titles of the YouTube videos, so I copied-pasted them in as captions so that the audience has some sense of what they can view.

I also discovered by accident that you can group Sway elements by clicking-dragging the elements over one another. There are grouping options available as well. This might be a good strategy to keep related content closely associated for pedagogical reasons.

Kaltura

  1. Created a Channel in Kaltura
  2. Created a Playlist in Kaltura
  3. “Add New” > “YouTube Video”
  4. Copied-pasted link to video
  5. Returned to new Kaltura Channel > clicked on checkbox next to video > “Publish”

This process takes too long. I don’t want to have to do multiple steps for every video.

Using GIFs of Screencasts

I’ve just started up a new Sway to document my efforts to find a balance between text and video screencasts when trying to help others with computer questions.
Click the image above to view a sample GIF. Unfortunately, this site does not natively display animated GIFs stored in the associated media libraries.

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: VR and 360 Video

Great presentation from Bill, Linas, Alicia (and Joe, in absentia). Awesome examples of 360 vid in SPLED and the Home Healthcare courses. Lots of questions for me. I am curious about their goal to progress from one level to another. I assume they are talking about expanding their capabilities as opposed to just a linear progression. There will always be a place for “plain, 2d video.” Bill mentioned that when the nursing team he was talking with had some ideas that while were inspired through a demonstration of 360 vid, didn’t seem like a clear pedagogical fit for that technology when they started looking at the request in more detail.

One of my goals this upcoming year would be to find a sound pedagogical fit for at least one 360 vid in at least one course that I support.

  • Can we do a Spark Team? Folks sharing quick exploration of various new topics.
  • Different levels: Traditional Video, 360 Video, VR, AR – when do you make the progression?
  • How could we use 360 Video in IST?

Progress on the Decision Tool for the Instructional Use of Video website

I have been serving on a sub-committee to develop an online tool that will hopefully help faculty when they’ve made a decision to use video in their courses.

April Millet is the chair, and we’re joined by Ryan Wetzel, Victoria Raish, John Buckwalter, and Peter Warren.

In our last few meetings, we’ve been hammering away at the Formidable Forms plug-in for WordPress. We’re trying to squeeze our required functionality out of the tool and we think we have a solution. I have to give a huge shout out to Ryan who was behind the keyboard and lead a lot of the detailed tinkering of the code.

I spent this morning deconstructing the code again and worked to establish a process. I was successful and even worked on some formatting things that were bugging me. I took everything I learned and blasted out a working draft of the tool on our website.

I’ve documented my work thus far in five screencasts that have been posted to my YouTube channel. I still have more work to capture there, but it’s a good start.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve proven that it can be done and all we need to do is fine-tune our content and delivery and we should be very close to delivery.

Gravity Forms at sites.psu.edu going “bye bye”?

I’ve been working with Ryan Wetzel on building a tool for faculty that will hopefully help them to understand options for using video content for instructional purposes.

We began this project almost a year ago, before CampusPress took over the duty of hosting our Penn State WordPress sites. The transition has been rocky for me as I’ve blogged about in earlier entries.

The newest hiccup is that there are apparently issues with Gravity Forms on this new platform. I’ll share Ryan’s assessment of what he has seen…

For us, Gravity Forms is still working more or less as it is supposed to, however we are getting locked out of forms with no way to unlock them to edit content. Campuspress recommends we clone the form and delete the original whenever this happens then replace the form ID with the new form ID on the page where the form is located. This works for awhile until the form locks us out again.

My staff has been working on duplicating our existing forms in Formidable. It mostly does the same stuff however it formats dates and time in strange ways and allows the user to submit incorrect data (rather than supply a calendar or limiting selections to real HH:MM selections).

It’s hard to say about the conditional logical until we actually spend time building something out with it. However I do believe that Campuspress plans on doing away with Gravity Forms at some point, not sure when, and that Formidable is their forms platform going forward.

I began porting our content over from Gravity Forms into Formidable Forms this morning. Thankfully the process has gone well so far. At worst, this will be additional work because we have to copy and paste all of the content from one form into another. There is not automatic export-import function from what I can tell.

We’ll keep pushing ahead for the time being and hope that all goes well. Do you have any experiences with either Gravity Forms or Formidable? Has your transition to CampusPress gone well?