Applying Principles and Theories into Screencasting exploring

For this week’s exploration about screencasting, I decided to introduce a Chinese video editing tool that I am using it a lot lately which is called “剪映Jian Ying(Chinese version of Capcut)“. In the youtube video I created below, I created a editing tutorial about basic and simple tools (functions) included in this application that can be used and learned very fast and widely applied to different types of videos. The screencasting tool I used for my video is zoom.

Principles that I got to experience and successfully applied:

During the exploration about using zoom to give this introduction (tutorial) for this editing tool, I am very aware of not letting my audiences to be extraneous overloaded, therefore I applied the Cognitive Load Theory (which is one of Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning) when scheduling what to say before recording, I only included basic tools that are important and effective and avoided tools or functions within those tools that are complicated and need deep exploring. During the recording process, I followed the voice principle and personalization principle to record my voice into the video and used “we can do like this…” instead of “it can be done by doing this…” to create a conversational environment which may let audiences learn better. I gave the voice explanation and the editing process synchronously by following the Dual Coding Theory (our brains has two seperate systems that allow us to process pictures and words at the same time without affecting the learnig effectiveness) and achieved Modality based on this theory that video editing is a complex process that requires multiple skills and ability to organize, however my video is only 11 minutes (very fast paced) so I think choosing to present this tutorial by narrations and diagrams is the most effective way for my audience to learn about this skill.

Principles and other things that I got into trouble and found chappenging to keep up:

Unfortunately, I did not have a good experience about Redundancy principle and Coherence principle. I have to admit that my fluency in English is not particularly good because English is my second language, and when recording videos, I was afraid of making mistakes, which caused my sentences to be incoherent, with strange pauses and lots of repetition of the same words. Moreover, because this is a Chinese video editing tool, the language on my screen is Chinese (of course I believe that if anyone who is downloading this app they can switch to whatever language they want through the setting), so this could be another thing that might be giving my audience hard time to follow what I was introducing. Therefore I think I failed to apply these principles well when recording my video. Another trouble that I noticed after reviewing my recorded video was that although my voice was recorded into the video, there was no screen sound so the sample audio that I introduced to my audiences could not be showed.which may imply my lack of exploration about zoom recording…I think this is also distracting and might be annoying too.

Overall conclusion：

The whole process is somehow a little bit hard for me because I experienced many issues while recording (e.g. where to save my video files, what to introduce and how to organize all basic steps about editing a video), which is also the point that surprised me. When I was learning about the Theories, I never thought that knowing these theories and applying them feels like entering into two different worlds to me. Obviously applying these theories is a lot harder than just understan ding them. I think my audiences would be people who are interested in Chinese apps and also interested in learning new skills. Next time I will try to improve my fluency when presenting and also using more principles and try to make my content more simplified so that my audiences can learn the knowledge better and faster.

Comment to classmate: Spring House