Welcome!

Greetings to everyone I've met at the American Library Association's 2008 Annual Conference. Thanks for stopping by my presentation and visiting my page. Below you can read about my perspectives on screencasting as a Reference & Instruction Librarian. Feel free to contact me at karen [dot] sobel [at] ucdenver [dot] edu. Also, check out my colleagues Denise Pan and Meg Brown-Sica's thoughts on screencasting in other areas of librarianship.

The following tutorials correspond with skills taught during my freshman composition library sessions.

My Top 5 Adobe Captivate Features

Captivate offers bazillions of features. Learning to focus on just a few of them, and to use them well, has helped me streamline my process for creating tutorials. When my students seem to need a new tutorial, I use these few skills to create a quick but effective Flash movie. Then I embed the movie in a Web page, and list the steps of the process beneath the movie.

My top 5 features are (in no particular order):

Feel free to contact me if you need advice on building your Captivate skills!

My Perspectives on Screencasting

The following questions and answers correspond with those Denise, Meg, and I discussed as a group on our poster. These are my detailed answers, reflecting my perspective as a Reference & Instruction Librarian.

Who is your audience?

I give instruction sessions to classes throughout the humanities and social sciences. However the bulk of my teaching is freshman composition classes.

Why a screencast?

I make sure all my students can get to the databases, make an Interlibrary Loan request, and so on during class. But we cover a lot of ground, and naturally they've forgotten some skills by the time they go home and try. I want to "be there for them" when they need a reminder. Our library also serves a large nontraditional student population—many of our students are new to using computers, and may not spend much time on campus. This is a way to reach out to the students where they live and at their levels.

What do you use to create your tutorials?

I use Adobe Captivate, then embed my tutorials in a Web page using Macromedia Dreamweaver. I've created CSS code that makes formatting easy.

What are some best practices?

I've developed a set of preferences over time—such as always making my tutorials silent, because my students may watch the tutorials in the library computer labs.

In my tutorials, I try to demonstrate basic skills exactly the way I do in class. During instruction sessions, I keep an eye open for repetitive problems. It's satisfying to be able to say "I'll make you a tutorial on that—it will be up by tomorrow." The students respond well to that.

How do you publicize your screencasts?

This is a [happy!] challenge since I have a potential audience of 40,000. Three main things I do are:

  1. Provide the address for my tutorials page on class handouts, and point it out during class.
  2. Make my colleagues aware of the tutorials, and encourage sharing them with students.
  3. [Forthcoming!] Make the link to the tutorials more easily accessible from the library's home page.

What don't you do?

If a student asks me for help face-to-face in any setting, I never, never respond by telling them to watch the tutorial. We always practice the skill together instead!

How do you know whether your screencast is effective?

This is something I'm working on. When students I've worked with in the instruction lab show me their skills later on, I know that something has worked. I'd like to find an effective way to directly examine the effects of my tutorials though.

What about colleagues' feedback?

Several of my colleagues are especially enthusiastic about the tutorials, and provide me with lots of feedback. I have to keep the tutorials' length in mind when I take their suggestions, because they always seem to make the tutorial get longer and longer!

Examples of My Screencasting Projects

Below are three examples of my screencasts. Visit Denise Pan and Meg Brown-Sica's pages to compare these with their examples!

 

Title Search

Prospector

Newsbank: America's Newspapers

Identify Need This is a basic skill we go over when I demonstrate the library catalog. I encourage students to try it themselves with a familiar book.
Our state-wide interlibrary loan service; at the reference desk, most undergraduate and some graduate students seem unaware of it.
During one instruction session, numerous students got "lost" on the way to finding "NewsBank: America"s Newspapers." I promised them a tutorial, which I created and posted within a few hours after class.
Create Quick to view and quick to create! This one was more challenging since there are numerous ways to access and search Prospector. I decided to focus on raising awareness, and completing the most common function—the title search. I had to decide what to focus on—just finding the database (which was the students' main problem) or including basic search skills. I decided to include search skills since the geographic element frequently threw students off as well.
Market
Since I almost always demonstrate title searches in freshman composition classes, I use that time to promote the whole set of tutorials.
 Many of the composition courses are taught by graduate students, who will put in an enthusiastic pitch during class. I then point out that they may not need this today, but later on they can relearn to use it with the tutorial.
Typically I only market tutorials for individual databases when I demonstrate that database in class. However, students can access any tutorials they want through my tutorial index page.
Assess Nothing formal.
Right now our reference desk gets literally dozens of title search questions each day. I hope that as more freshmen use this tutorial, we'll see that they can do title searches on their own.		 Nothing formal.
Anecdotally, more of my undergraduate students seem aware of it now than in the past. The tutorial can only help.		 Nothing formal—and this one is brand new!