In class on Thursday we randomly selected three of the screencasts we did a few weeks ago to watch.
The first one was by a classmate and it was on using the Beeline Reader Plug-in for your browser. This was something I have looked at before but for whatever reason I don't think I installed it. Anyway, it's a really neat bit of software which softly shifts colors on pages with a lot of text so that your eye can read faster and with less strain. I actually find it really helpful, and must remember to install it on my Chrome browser on my laptop once I get home. Anyway, the actual screencast was very nice. It was easy to follow along with, her pacing was really good, and she showed just where everything should go in a browser in case you had never used plug-ins (extensions?) before. Overall, a really excellent example.
The second screencast we watched actually was a podcast, because we have the wonderful opportunity to have a student who is blind in our class. So she did a podcast on how to use a particular piece of software put out by the National Library Service called BARD: Braille and Audio Reading Download which is basically like downloading a book to your Kindle or Nook but for the visually or physically impaired. Her podcast was great because she explained both how the service worked as well as the actions a blind person would need to do to access it, such as explaining where specific buttons were and the motions a person would need to do to get there. She also allowed her screen reading technology to play in the background of her podcast so that the person listening would be able to hear what the screen reader would say. I think that having this student in our class is really eye-opening, and in a program where accessibility is highly-stressed (hopefully it is highly-stressed in all library science programs), her presence alone reminds us to always keep accessibility in mind. I know that in my own screencast, I tried to keep her in mind and say out loud the area of the screen a person would find a specific button. I'm not sure if I always succeeded, but it was a great reminder to make things as accessible as I can.
The third screenshot we watched was on the software/website Canva.com. I thought that this was an incredibly awesome bit of technology. It's free and is pretty much a drag-and-drop graphic design tool for anything from posters to presentations to invitations and more. I swear I learn about cool things every day lately. Anyway, the screencast was very good, easy to follow along, and her voice was very confident!
Based on the random sampling of my classmate's work, I imagine that they were all pretty great!
Based off of the above tutorial on Canva, I felt like I was in a safe enough space to ask what in the world a "poster session" is. I get a call to submit my work to a poster session probably daily in my email, and long have I wondered what that means. I imagined it involved a poster (wow) and perhaps some kind of small presentation, but beyond that, I had no idea. Thanks to Kristin and my peers, the mystery has been solved! A poster presentation is where you make a poster for a conference and stand by it and talk to whoever approaches you about your work. Kristin likened it to a science fair, which really helped. So now, once I have done something I think someone might be interested in, I can apply to do a poster session at a conference and know what that actually is. I think I will actually do one on my "Alternative" Alternative Spring Break mini-project I am planning on doing for the expoSItion.
Finally, we watched a great TED talk by Jane McGonigal (spoilers: she does not turn into a cat, sadly) on How Gaming Can Make a Better World, which was really interesting. She used World of Warcraft as her perpetual example, and my deep hatred of the game tainted her presentation for me, but overall it was really interesting. She basically talks about how gamers spend so much time working at gaming that they become "experts" in that area, and we should be channeling that expertise into a game that will actually make a difference for today's world problems. I found it to be a little far-flung, but I thought it was interesting and innovative. We used the TED talk as a starting point for creating evaluative surveys for post-workshops and the do's and don't's of that.
The screenshot sampling was really interesting to me, too. It was amazing how many different tools are out there, and how many different ways people have tried to teach others about them. It is really, really easy to do a bad screenshot-- and only practice doing them, then the process of getting feedback on them, will make them easier to do effectively. They are a really neat way of teaching people things when those people (like me) would rather not actually ASK how to do something. It's some sort of misplaced pride, I guess-- we don't want people to know that we don't know. Making screenshots available is a great way to work around that.
ReplyDelete