Week 4: Overview

Week 4: Showcase Designs

This book contains some final ideas about presenting the unit design project (and prototype learning activity) - in synchronous session and in final design plan report.

Sharing Design Plans

During this final week of FLO Design, you'll be asked to share your Design Project and prototype learning activity in two ways:

• present your design in a timed Showcase event (or equivalent screencast/video);
• post details of your final design and prototype learning activity in a Studio Forum for others to view (and provide feedback)

Showcase Overview

We'll try to organize a number of synchronous sessions to allow participants to share their designs. The FLO Facilitators will provide information at the end of Week 3 about a proposed schedule and sign-up process.

If you can't participate in a synchronous session, try to provide a detailed description and illustratin of your project in the final Week 4 Studio Forum - consider providing a brief screencast to explain the highlights of your design.

Tips - Ideas

The following pages present some ideas and tips for presenting your final design plan.

Showcasing Your Plan

You'll only have a short period of time to "showcase" - this will help you focus on

• why others might find your design interesting / useful / meaningful
• what pedagogical perspectives, ideas, beliefs, strategies you used
• how your design will support learning / learners

Planning a presentation can be a visual, text-based, audio or multimedia process. We've provided some suggestions for simple drawing tools - could you use them to help you plan what you want to include in your timed Showcase presentation?

You might find it useful to use a tool from movie and television production - storyboarding? Here's a simple structure that might help you plan how your Showcase presentation will look and what you'll say and share - Storyboarding Template

Ideas?

Timed presentations are popular in business and education. We're all bombarded with opportunities to learn, new ideas and information - presenting new information in a concise and interesting way is an important skill in designing for online learning.

Here are some examples of timed presentations - you can review them quickly. Take note of what appeals to you, what stands out in each example and what you might try in your presentation.

Three Minute Thesis (a competitive event that's been hosted by UBC for several years)

Pecha Kucha style presentations - the model is 20 slides in 20 minutes but this example is a tightly timed 7 min presentation that you might find helpful - by Susan Clements-Vivian at the SFU Lean Into Learning conference

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Creating a Screencast

What's a screencast?

Screencasts are recordings of activity on your computer screen (or mobile device) - usually screencasts are accompanied by explanatory audio.

Screencasts are created to demonstrate, to explain, to share an example(s). You can create a screencast using images pre-captured or created to highlight an idea (or event, feature, website or process.

Features of a "good" screencast

• has a focus or clear objective
• is short - usually 3-5 min in length
• is clear - images are in focus and appropriate size/scale
• audio is clear, without annoying "hisses"
• plays in any web browser and on different platforms
• includes a text version readable by a screenreader (accessibility issue)

Equipment required for a screencast

• a computer or mobile device
• a screencast recording tool (see below for ideas)
• a way to record audio (headset with microphone, good quality built-in mic)
• a place to store the recording so it can be linked on the website (e.g., Youtube)

Free tools to create screencasts

• Screencastomatic
• Camstudio