Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies
At a recent TLC brownbag session, 4 faculty members from 4 disciplines shared tips for getting started with “Untethered Lecture Capture,” a tool for using an iPad or tablet to show slides and annotate them in real time during class, while moving around the room. They offered these tips to anyone considering adopting ULC, which also allows a teacher to upload a lecture for students to review after absences or simply for multiple exposures to critical content.
- Don’t overdo it as you get started. It’s not the best tool for a whole course or for some sessions of a given course .
- Fancy graphics on slides aren’t necessary. You’ll be adding to your slides as you teach the session, and often simpler text and graphic combos are more fertile grounds for that.
- ULC is great to capture group work, possibly replacing posters and markers. Small groups of students can work on a regular piece of paper (eg in a notebook), and you can take a photo of that and upload it in real time to the room’s projector for reporting out and debriefing.
- An untethered teacher keeps students off balance in a good way. There’s no more back row that has little contact with the professor if you are able to move around the room, so fewer digressions into social media.
- ULC technology is not perfect, and making mistakes together with the tool, or being thwarted by the occasional bad connection helps build community, trust and empathy.
- ULC can help professors keep the class moving when they are away from campus for professional travel; it’s also a way for athletes or other travelling students to have access to the professor’s content and the discussions that occur in class in their absence.
- There are 52 professors on campus using ULC (so far). Chances are that peer wisdom lurks in your own hallway!
- ULC is effective in helping students create and observe visual models of complex or unseen processes. A picture really can be better than a thousand eloquent words.
- Student tutors can use the tool to capture explanations in a tutoring session and share on the Moodle page of the relevant class. Sometimes students grasp the vocabulary of another student when the more polished words of a professor still feel a bit foggy.
- ULC is one tool, not THE tool, for being an effective teacher.