The most recent assignment we completed for our English 510 class was a multimedia tutorial. Our task was to select an online language-learning tool, investigate its features, and create a narrated tutorial that briefly describes the tool and how it can be used in a language learning context.
I chose Quizlet for my tutorial. While I was familiar with the concept of digital flashcards, I had never used them before. So I was glad to have the chance to get familiar with Quizlet and think about how I might use it myself.
Here’s how my tutorial ended up:
I created my tutorial using Camtasia. This was my first time using Camtasia, and I was impressed with it overall. I found it easy to learn and feature rich. When I’ve needed to create screencasts before, I’ve used QuickTime. QuickTime has the bare minimum in terms of capability, so it’s incredibly easy to use, but it doesn’t offer a lot of tools to help in postproduction. Not so with Camtasia. It was fun to play with different zooms, transitions, and call-outs as I edited my screencast footage, and I think it definitely made the final product seem more polished and user-friendly. Doing all that postproduction was time consuming, though, so I imagine if I were in a situation where I had to, say, provide video feedback for all students in a writing class, I’d likely stick with QuickTime and not worry about doing any postproduction.
As of now, my video has five whole views! It’s likely that all of those views are mine and Jim’s, but hopefully a few more people might stumble on it and find something in it that’s useful.
Jordan, I have heard about Quizlet from you in class time, but I haven’t used it before. I enjoyed watching your tutorial. The way you talk about tools in Quizlet is so clear that I already liked it 🙂 I will sign up and practice for sure!
Thanks for the compliment, Leyla. I’m glad you found the video useful!
Jordan, I found your multimodal tutorial very comprehensive. I appreciate that you showed how to use all of the features, and used editing to fit them into the time limit. It really shows the diverse features available to Quizlet users.
Thanks for the kind words, Kristin. I really appreciate it!
I agree with them. I find the instructions in your tutorial easy to understand and the features you introduced are interesting. I’ll be a Quizlet user.
Thanks Huang! I didn’t know about Quizlet until this assignment. I’ll be a user too. 🙂
I love Quizlet! Wish I had had this tutorial when I was using Quizlet in my classroom.
I appreciate what you said about Camtasia being “feature rich” … this is a really positive way to approach learning a new program. I took the other approach, which was more negative: “I don’t need all these features” … “QT can do basically the same thing” … etc. It’s helpful to hear that someone enjoyed those features which I felt made the learning curve unnecessarily higher. We can always count on Jordan to be positive. (And Kim to be negative.) 😉
Hahahah, “feature-rich” is a bit of a euphemism, isn’t it? I’ve definitely had the too-many-features reaction too. So many features really can be off-putting!
Jordan, I loved the tutorial! It looks so professional and really seems that you are an expert in screencasting. Quizlet looks a great tool for teaching and learning vocabulary. I will put it in my future teaching plans!
Glad to hear it, Afnan! And thanks so much for the kind words!