Creating Videos for Greater Student Engagement
Fall 2015 and Spring 2016
In the fall semester of 2015, I was inspired to start a new project. I decided to create a series of instructional videos for students on working important problems used in Knowledge Discovery in Databases. I originally had the idea to begin working on this project while holding informal study sessions with other students. I create the videos using widely available open source software, and post them publically on YouTube. This process involves creating problems, animating them, and recording a voice over to explain the procedure. I have continued this project into the spring semester of 2016, and hope to continue it into the future. My time this semester doing classroom teaching has inspired more videos, and I hope to continue expanding my library of material into the future.
As I spend more time doing classroom teaching, I have become convinced that these videos have significantly impacted my lecture style. Spending many hours listening to recordings of my own voice, and re-recording anything that was too fast, or unclearly spoken has changed how I speak when I lecture. I feel that this experience has taught me a great deal about explaining concepts in a clear manner. They have helped me improve my skills in creating clear illustrations of concepts. These videos have been a significant time investment, but it is extremely gratifying to create something that can be used on a wide scale. I was extremely gratified to discover that as of May 2016, my most popular video has had over 5000 view from many countries.
A link to my playlist can be found here. I am currently in the process of creating videos and hope to continue posting throughout my university career.
Computing Literacy for Homeschool Students
Fall 2014 and Spring 2015
For computing leadership service, I chose to do a project targeted at improving computer literacy for homeschool students. In the fall of 2014, I taught a class to a group of students from a local homeschool group. We held weekly sessions each lasting an hour. I wanted to focus on basic computer skills that they could utilize when they started their college careers, rather than more technical topics. I also wanted to show ways that using a computer could be fun and interesting rather than intimidating. Some of the sessions were spent on teaching the students how to use basic tools to help them with later college courses, such as a brief introduction to Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. Some of the students had used these before, but others had a much more limited understanding. One of my goals was demonstrating how these programs could be applied to their classes, such as using Excel for a science or math class, with examples from my own work. Another priority, was helping them learn the basics of using their own computers more effectively. We discussed how files are stored and saved, organizing documents, and cloud storage. We also briefly discussed some issues related to basic computer security. Several sessions were dedicated to helping students learn the basics of using photo editing and vector graphics tools. These are useful for many computing oriented tasks, but are also an excellent way to show how using technology can enhance creativity.
I am including a few photos from the fall 2014 portion of the project. Both were taken at the Iredell County Public Library where we had our meetings. The upper picture includes me explaining one of my favorite digital designs. I wanted the class to have a chance to create something seasonal, and learn about using Inkscape's duplication, rotation and grouping tools. I like to think that everyone enjoyed the geometric snowflakes we created. If you would like to see a better view of the designs click here for the design in the photo, and here for the red and white version we used to discuss color changes. The lower photo was taken in one of the upper rooms. We often used those rooms in the last portion of the semester.
For the spring semester of 2015, I attempted to expand my project to reach a larger group of students. I decided to take the materials and resources I created and formalize them. This led to posting my tutorials and topics online so people can read at their convenience. I made significant adjustments to my planned list of materials. Many of the issues that I had touched on briefly in my class, I expanded into longer pieces. I discarded a few topics, and added a number of others.
One of the most interesting parts of the experience was the challenge of changing material that was created to be presented in person, into self-contained lessons. This required going into considerably more depth on some of the points than I originally planned. One of the most interesting parts of this project, was deciding what level of depth and amount of technical language to include. I decided to target my audience very precisely, and focus on middle and high school students that have limited experience using their computers.
If you are interested in viewing this project, you can find it here.