eToolbox: Mapping Technologies to Learning - Slides with voiceover for acquisition

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What are slides with voiceover?

Slides with voiceover can be described in the most general sense as capturing a slideshow with an accompanying audio track.  When I think of slideshows I think of PowerPoint and these are probably the most commonly used slides, along with Keynote for Macs. The simplest way to incorporate a voiceover is directly through the PowerPoint recording option. More advanced packages, such as Articulate and ISpring, are available which allow these slides to be published to online media or flash packages. Other packages, such as SoundSlides, used more commonly in photojournalism and multi-media studies are finding they way in educational roles. These combine high quality graphical slideshows with accompanying text.

This learning approach unsurprisingly shares many similar advantages to the screen capture movies for acquisition. As teachers know teaching through acquisition allows a lot of material to be transmitted in a controlled way. Added audio to slides allows for more information to be transmitted simultaneously by using the audio and visual channels simultaneously. Useful for blended learning, teachers can maximise on expensive face time by having additional information provided by online lectures. Slides with voice over are an easy way to capture lecture-type material keeping the format in which the students are familiar. Control is given to the students where they can watch the material at any time, any number of times and they can watch just the sections they find most useful.

A very important part of the tools available for the delivery of slides with voiceover online is the ability to incorporate activities for the students.  This is seen by many as critical to the successful delivery of all eLearning and conventional learning modules.

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What will I learn on this page?

This page provides guidance to practitioners who wish to learn how to use screen capture movies to facilitate and support learning through acquisition, as per Diana Laurillard’s model. By following this page, reading its content, watching the videos and following the links provided you will be able to: 

• Describe and discuss why slides with voiceover is useful for supporting learning through acquisition.
• Select an appropriate product to implement a slides with voiceover on your course.
• Provide us with details of your experience of using slides with voiceover on your course.

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Why should I consider slides with voiceover for acquisition?

Activity 1: Watch this  short video from the University of Texas at Austin which explains a new and very promising approach to teaching. 

The important lines in this video are in describing the time before the lecture when the students have “access to lectures ahead of time” and after the lecture the students have “a greater collection of resources”. This requires the lectures to be available online to the students before the lectures. One way this has been implemented is by presenting the lectures as slides with audio. The students than have these for revision at a later stage. Quizzes are usually required in the pre-lecture material to make sure the students engage, these can be incorporated into the quizzes using software outlined below or handed out in paper.

Task:  Take a moment and consider if an online resource such as needed for the ‘flipped’ approach could also be useful in the conventional approach as a scaffolding tool for lectures or as a revision tool.

Activity 2: Watch this short YouTube video from ISpring which shows the functions of their FREE version of ISpring. This allows you to

• Publish your slides to FLASH video format
• Add audio to your slides
• Incorporate quizzes into the slideshow using survey questions or MCQs

Task: Take a moment to think of any questions that would be good to grab the attention of your students and get them thinking. Would you use the questions to prepare them for content to follow in the slideshow or to check their attention to previous content or to try and make connections between your content and other knowledge?

Can you think of any limitations to survey or MCQ questions? Do you require more advanced questions types such as ‘Drag and Drop’, ‘Join the dots’? More advanced packages are detailed in the section below.

Activity 3: Visit  the academic publishing site ELSEVIER which allows online academic articles to be supplemented by short slideshows with audio. This novel use of slides with audio for acquisition allow the author to

• summarise their article in their own words, with direct and easy referencing to graphs and images
• judge relevancy of the paper in a way some might find more appealing than reading the abstract
• complement the article when slides with audio appears on the site

Activity 4: Soundslides is a software package for creating audio slideshows, a combination of still photography and audio recordings used predominantly in photojournalism. Read this interview from Campfire Journalism with the creator of SoundSlides, Joe Weiss.

Task: Can you relate Joe Weiss' answer on “the inherent value of still and moving images” to a project in your area. Take note of his answer on “On possible challenges and pitfalls”

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How can I use slides with voiceover for acquisition?

Activity 1: Watch this video which explains how to use screencast to video online lectures through Google hangout.

Activity 2: Read through this short pdf by EDUCASE 7 things you should know about screencasting paying particular attention to point 7, What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Activity 3: Watch this step-by-step how-to guides through from the  UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on creating slides and voiceover using SoundSlides. This video shows how to publish the slides using dropbox.

Activity 4: Visit the Open Culture website which takes high-quality cultural & educational media and centralises this content and curates it. Find some interesting ideas for lectures, online animations and other useful material

Task: Having reviewed all the material in the four activities above, post a message to our discussion forum in response to the following question:

1. Is there anything interesting or useful you have learned from these resources?

2. Are there some things that are difficult to understand?

3. How did watching these videos help you think about the design of screen capture for your course?

4. Have the comments on your ideas made by other contributors made you rethink the issue?

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What products can I use for slides with voiceover for acquisition?

Activity: Review the tools below.

The tools I will begin with which are the most important I feel in this field not only create slides with voiceover. They also include sophisticated tools to develop online courses, increase the level of interactivity in the presentations and also contain publishing tools which allow the output to be FLASH animation or HTML5 or common formats used by learning management systems.

These are

• Articulate
• ISpring
• Captivate

 ISpring free allows slides with voiceover and the integration of simple quizzes.

Documentary style high quality picture slides with audio using SoundSlides.

This website explains how to record audio over slides over any slide tool viewing/producing tool using standard Mac and PC tools.

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Give me an example of using slides with voiceover for acquisition!

Activity: Review this case study.

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Tell us about your experience of using slides with voiceover for acquisition.

Please use the comment box below to tell us about your experience of using slides with voiceover for acquisition. If you have created a resource elsewhere, please provide a link.