Ed Tech Vignette: Race and Class in American Politics

Instructor: Jim Glaser

Department: Political Science

Course: Race and Class in American Politics

Technology Used: MediaMarkup (video annotation platform) – http://spark.uit.tufts.edu

How ETS supported this: Helped instructor and TA define workflow for making videos web ready

Tags: Video, Presentations, MediaMarkup

What were the learning goals?

I hope students will learn and master some basic social scientific methodological skills and apply those skills to a research project.  Further, I want them to engage in a public speaking exercise of roughly half an hour to learn some speaking, presentation, and question and answer techniques.   

In what way did using MediaMarkup support these goals?

I used MediaMarkup to provide students with a view of their presentation.  MediaMarkup gives me the ability to annotate their talks so that they can connect my observations to their performance.  Additionally, the public speaking exercise allows them to present their initial research findings and gives me and the rest of the students in the class the opportunity to react to those findings and give guidance on how to proceed with the research project.  

What did you feel worked well/not so well?

I love the fact that students can see themselves give their talks.  That’s terrifically educational.  I’ve done this project without MediaMarkup but my feedback is not as effective when students don’t have the opportunity to actually see what I am commenting on.  

Next Steps/Refinements

I’ve tried this in several different ways and this one works best.

 

Leave a Reply