It’s reading week! 

 

No classes Monday-Wednesday this week, so we don’t have a ECDI 336 class to reflect on this week. However, I spent last weekend doing a 24 hour charity event that I streamed so I thought I would reflect on the digital resources I used for that.

 

Myself and six others pledged to play games, and stream it all, for 24 straight hours last weekend. We started at 3 pm Saturday and ended a little after 3 pm on Sunday. I can truly say that I am amazed that my computer did not melt during the event. I was attending as a player but I was also the “producer” as I was running the stream, monitoring chat, checking and reporting on donations received, and playing a soundscape for the event.

 

I was trying to think of ways that I could use the digital tools for this event in educational ways so I’ll run through the tools and how they could be used in schools.

Discord – This is what we used for the players videos and audio feeds. It has some similarities to Zoom, but is meant for smaller groups with the bonus that the chat never goes away. Last March one of my profs used this when we switched to online classes and it was good for screen sharing and asking questions (in text or voice chat) it might be better for small classes.

 

Foundry VTT – This was our solution for our virtual tabletop. This could be interesting to use as a way to add some gamification to a lesson. You can create a map of just about anything and have students roll dice (digitally or in a classroom) for math games. 

 

Epidemic Sound – This site has hundreds of hours of music available. Yet I don’t know that it would be very useful in a classroom setting with the exception of using it as background music.

 

OBS Studios – This is a really powerful tool and I have  only scratched the surface of it. I think this would be most useful when creating online or video presentations. You can make different “scenes” and transition between them smoothly. For my purposes I had a starting soon, stream, be right back, video clips, and thank you scenes that I would transition between during the 24 hours. I think this would be great to use for a presentation with scenes for talking heads, slide decks, videos, and displaying websites in a seamless manner. Because OBS Studios will record everything for you the video you create can be uploaded to YouTube or sent directly to teachers and/or students. This software lasted over 24 hours and recorded the whole event! I’m impressed with both it and my computer for being able to handle that, not that anyone needs to record a 24 hours presentation.

 

That’s all I have to say about this for now.

Until next time!