UMUC

Center for Teaching and Learning

Online Faculty Innovators: Andy Cavanaugh

Transcript:

What do you feel is the educational significance of using a tool such as Impatica?

I am an English instructor, mostly of teaching composition—and you're trying to teach grammar rules, paragraph development, eventually essay development....To do that all in text is problematic. Students have to read pages and pages of your explanations on the web, or you can send them to a website which will have pages and pages of explanations on how to make subjects and verbs agree, or how to make pronoun and antecedent agree, or how to form an adjective clause and things of that nature. Impatica allows the instructor to put some text and narrate by voice in PowerPoint presentations. With the voice narration and text, it provides a more dynamic instructional method to students.

What is the technological advantage of using Impatica?

PowerPoint presentations come in a .wav file format. What Impatica does is compress these files and allows these compressed files to be easily posted on the web. Impaticize the file, put narration, audio narration, and text in a streamable file on the web, and you have a more user-friendly application for the students.

What features of the program did you find desirable or useful?

The ease of the interface of Impatica allows the lecturer to correct the slides or audio without starting over the whole powerpoint presentation. Impatica has a feature that lets the student advance to the next slide or go back 12 slides, which provides ease as compared to listening to a 15-minute lecture on grammar. Students may advance or go back to a particular slide to learn more or repeat a specific subject matter they may be struggling with or be interested in; they can skip slides. Instructors should also be aware of these playback controls.

Is the audio component easy to implement?

When impaticizing a PowerPoint file, the microphone or audio quality may have to be a trial and error in the beginning of a PowerPoint lecture; it's not just sitting for five minutes and recording for audio and it's done. Yet, ultimately you may do a little tweaking in the program (if a paragraph's not supposed to be there, or the sound may be a little scratchy and unclear). It is a learning experience, that is what I'd like other professors to understand about Impatica. And the more you do it, the more you get comfortable and confident

What kind of feedback have you received thus far?

Only one response from a studentso far. The white and purple background was a strain to the eyes; my voice was a little too bass-y, perhaps I had my mouth too close to the microphone; and if there would be another animated way for sentences to appear and reappear. However, given these changes, the student thinks this would be a very helpful tool for students in my class.