Professional Development Session for Community College Instructors – Update 2

I've made progress (and many changes) to my Multimedia Montage Project (MMP). Mine is a professional development session for community college instructors aimed at providing them the knowledge and recommended tools to produce educational videos to facilitate their classes.

The project's original proposal can be read here.

Course Description Revision Requested
Before this class started, I submitted a description of this PD session to my community college's professional development department (known as KCELT), which reads as follows:

Upon reading this, I've asked if I can make a revision, and hope to hear back later this week. Specifically, I want to revise the second sentence to read: "During this session, participants will learn how to plan and produce a simple tutorial using a screencasting tool."

The main reason for this change is tied to the cost differences associated with Camtasia ($169) vs. other programs, such as Screencast-O-Matic (free, and which I was already using) and Screencastify (free or $2/month, which I learned about thanks to classmate Christine Blanos' critique). Also, classmate Patti Forsman rightfully pointed out instructors would have to pay for software out of pocket so it would worth it to talk about all three programs and instead of limiting it to just one.

Pre-Course Survey
Professor Dudley inquired about a pre-session survey since I already have a post-session survey (info near the end). After some thought, I decided a survey before the session may help me customize the presentation based on who registers. My Pre-Course Survey can be viewed in Google Drive.

Introductory Video
I later decided to add a promo piece about the professional session, a short commercial to promote the class. Since this session is scheduled with KCELT, I would send this video to my contact there with suggested platforms on which to post it. These include posting a link to the video on the KCELT website, in a daily marketing email about upcoming KCELT sessions sent to all faculty, and the KCELT Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I struggled with some technicalities last week and this week figured out how to make this video happen. Here's what I did:

1. Created a short PowerPoint.
2. Did a voice recording with Audacity, saved as a .wav file.
3. Recorded a screencast of my PowerPoint (without my voice) with Screencast-O-Matic and saved the recording as a .mp4 file.
4. Opened up Camtasia on my PC (since my Mac has the large, watermarked trial version on it).
5. Imported the .wav file into Camtasia.
6. Imported the .mp4 file of the PowerPoint into Camtasia.
7. Imported the .mp4 files of the three critiques – Camtasia, Audacity, and FreeOnlinePhotoEditor.com – I created with Screencast-O-Matic into Camtasia.
8. Imported a .mp3 music file into Camtasia.
9. Started editing.

Looking back I could've done step 3 in Camtasia, but didn't want to deal with any formatting issues of the PowerPoint from Mac to PC. In addition, after creating the presentation, Professor Dudley recommended uploading the PowerPoint to Google Slides and then accessing the URL from any device. That's not something I thought of previously but I did just that for the content of my session. In any case, here's the end result, also viewable on YouTube.

Professional Development Presentation 
Last week I presented my outline for the PD presentation, which was guided by the storyboard assignment. I converted the structure into a basic PowerPoint presentation which is now available for view on Google Slides.

New Resource Website
Last week I started a basic website that would serve as a resource to my attendees. This was important because if I do teach this session outside my role as an adjunct I want to provide a place that isn't linked to the college but something I have control over. I ended up scrapping the original site due to limitations with Wix and started over on Wordpress, a platform with which I'm more familiar. Since I'm on a free Wordpress site, there's no video on it - only screenshots. However, I've included the YouTube links of my critiques. The site is called Digital Tech Tools.

Post-Session Survey
Some of the default questions on Google forms don't apply, so I customized the questions on my post-session survey, which can be viewed here.

Future PD Sessions
I purposely wanted to keep the content of my session simple and limited. Introducing new tools is a major focus this first time around, and I know well how using a new program for an instructor can sometimes be intimidating, as well as take time and practice. For users who have more experience, I'd like to expand on this beginning session by offering future professional development sessions specific particular programs I've used and believe in. For me, this is where the benefit of the online communities comes in.

Google+
I joined a community called Higher Education, which led me to learn more about Camtasia's more sophisticated features. These include animated backgrounds, motion graphics, and color adjustments. An instructor who learns these features can benefit knowing how to emphasize key components of a lesson that will help students learn.

LinkedIn
A community called Higher Education Adjunct Faculty led me to LiveBinders, which is a program I'll experience this fall semester thanks to a course I'm inheriting from a colleague who introduced the program to me briefly. LiveBinders is basically a Dropbox-type site for class content that can be accessible to students and faculty. I also found this link with other teaching resources and makes me think an overall presentation about similar cloud services for education may be worth doing a session on in the future.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to the feedback from this update.

Shuva