My Mahara Video Tutorial

It all comes back around and starts to fit together. There are many possibilities that through new technology influence teaching and learning, without question. I have been thinking about experimenting with video tutorials. It actually started a couple of months back when I was working on some content for a newsletter. The idea was to send this newsletter to teachers every month with some information about a project. As a little nugget, it would include some form of new practical information, be it an App, a new Web 2.0 tool or something along those lines. So we found a couple of cool Web-Apps. We thought about writing a quick explanation about what it can do and how it could be used.

We didn't really have that much time to click through it and try everything. So we went on YouTube and started looking for tutorials, which we could attach as additional information for the teachers. It turns out there aren't that many video tutorials in german out there, especially for maybe lesser known Apps. That is where I first got the motivation to start something. I know there are a bunch of sites out there that put up lists and lists of Web 2.0 Apps, but clicking through all of them is tough. It would help teachers to just go on YouTube and type in an App name or maybe just a subject and then see short tutorials pop up. They shouldn't be much longer than 6-7 minutes. That way, even people with tighter schedules have an opportunity to check them out quickly and try to paint themselves a picture about the App and if it is worth using in their class.

Since I've been involved in teaching and coaching for quite a while now - so basically explaining for a living - I figured it shouldn't be that hard to record something for a couple of minutes. I got really lucky, because as it turns out one of the projects I'm involved in was somewhat in need for exactly that. This meant that I got an easy start, I got (had) to do my first tutorial about Mahara. This was exactly what I needed to get everything going and get to motivation to work through the issues you encounter in the beginning.

But enough about that, here is my first mini-tutorial about Mahara (this one is in german, but I might do something in english as well):