Last semester's lecture videos and test performance

I am teaching the same history class this semester as last. It is face to face and I do a lot of lecture. Last semester I used an Apple TV, an iPad Mini, and the Explain Everything app to record each of my lectures, which I made available to students for their review. This semester instead of doing the same I am giving my students access to last semester's lectures. I tell them the content is substantially the same as is what is important for the exams. The only difference are the jokes. I then wanted to see if there was any correlation between their performance on exams and whether they had looked at those online resources.

Captions for screen-capture videos

I do a modest number of screen-capture videos for my classes and blogs, and keeping them short includes among its benefits easier captioning. I used to rely on the speech-to-text capability built in to the Camtasia Studio product, but over the past few videos I have come to rely more often on YouTube's option to transcribe and set timings. I still use Camtasia to record my desktop videos but then publish directly to YouTube from there and click on the button to edit captions. I like the keyboard commands to control playback while typing what I hear, and the fact that YouTube handles the timing makes it much smoother. One thing I often forget is to publish the captions I typed and to unpublish YouTube's automatic captions. I would not want any YouTube fame to come from being one of those "caption fail" videos. ;-)

Flipping history and taking attendance

Last fall I taught a class with a peak enrollment of 84. We are required to document attendance where I teach so I therefore have to come up with some way to take roll each day. Yeah, like I am going to read out 84 names each time we meet (at least through the late-semester drop deadline). So I had a challenge with how I would take attendance in an efficient manner. I could have passed around a paper and asked them to sign in but I wanted to connect taking attendance to a learning activity.