While unable to narrate my "movie," produced with Camtasia due to the lack of a microphone , I find myself nonetheless captivated by how much more powerful from an educational standpoint the video capture becomes when the user can not only see a tutorial but hear it as well. Inspired to a little searching on the effectiveness of adding narration to video learning projects, I came across a pretty good article from the University of Minnesota that approached this issue from several directions, one of which was how audio enhancement was extremely effective for learning foreign languages. It might be deduced that audio has the potential to enhance any new information, regardless of the subject matter. Another avenue was how audio has helped many disabled students.
I know from my own experiences in the UF Specialist program that the PowerPoints utilized for the different classes that usually introduce important concepts are much more quickly assimilated due to the narrative component that is embedded within. The key to enhanced learning must be utilizing a variety of modalities. The quote "We hear and we forget. We see and we remember. We do and we understand." might be amended to say that if we hear, see, and practice, we add knowledge and skills to our cognitive being and we can apply them to a variety of applicable situations without having to go back and learn all over again.
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Hi, Jimmy. This is more of a response to the comment you left me than to your current blog post.
First, changing screen resolution:
Go to the START menu, select control panel. A window will come up...select appearance and themes. Then click 'change screen resolution.' In another window, on the bottom left, there is a slider that allows you to change the resolution. If you make the resolution higher (for example 800x600 to 1024x768) everything gets a little smaller and fits better on your screen. I believe 1024 is the optimal resolution for Camtasia.
Second, you asked about my viewpoint on calculators. I find it funny that someone told you the process is not as important as the product...I couldn't agree more!! The reason I don't normally like calculators is because students don't understand what the calculator is doing. You can hit the square root button as many times as you'd like, but will never fully understand what it's doing unless you've first practiced finding the root of a number on your own. Process is always the most important to me...hence the reason I force my students to show ALL work on every math problem they do for me. I don't give credit if there is no work shown. I don't care what the answer is, I care how they got there. Point is, this kind of attitude makes me skeptical about letting students use calculators. I only allow them after we've fully learned and mastered something. They are a shortcut for finding the answer, not the "only way," as some people view it.
I prefer calculators for saving time when the focus of the lesson isn't computation. For example, say we're graphing lines (stduents already know how to do this) and trying to find trends in their slopes. Why spend half the period graphing five lines? Instead, take note of their slopes, quickly graph them on the calculator and then make conclusions. The focus is the slopes, not the graphing.
I suppose this is a lengthy answer to your simple question, but the use of calculators is something I've struggled with a lot this year. Students are so dependent on them. I have some who don't even remember how to multiply any more, and if they can't use the calculator, they get every single problem incorrect. It's frustrating, to say the least.
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