Date - 1st April, 2010
Venue - A1-A2, Mathematics Dept., & KRESIT, IIT-B
The session started at 10:40 AM with a brief welcome to all the participants from Prof. Kannan Moudgalya. Then each of the participants gave a brief introduction of themselves to everybody assembled. The participants mainly consisted of B.Ed teachers and student-teachers from Mumbai and near-by areas. A few of us from the FOSSEE team, Vivek Khurana, and Ganesh from SPACE were the only programmers, who were participating. Dr. J. Shah and Dr. Manojendu, domain experts for Netlogo and Geogebra, respectively, were present to help and guide the participants.
This was followed by a short talk by Prof. Kannan highlighting the importance of Spoken Tutorials for a country like India. He started with a short demonstration on how simple it is to make a spoken tutorial. Using this, he highlighted, what he felt were the advantages of a spoken tutorial. Firstly, a well made spoken tutorial captures everything and doesn't leave anything to the imagination of a viewer, and eliminates problems of mis-communication. Secondly, it can be
prepared using relatively easily available equipment - A PC, and a mic. Thirdly, anybody can do it - from kids to housewives to retired people. Hence, it is a highly scalable thing. The talk lasted for about 20 mins and put the workshop in perspective and was a nice way to start.
Next was a talk by Nancy, giving the participants a guide on how to write a script for a spoken tutorial. Most of the things were common sense, but it's nice to have them stated explicitly. Notes [slightly modified] that I took during the workshop are at the end. This presentation also lasted for about 20mins.
This was followed by a talk by Dr. J. Shah on Netlogo. He showed a small demonstration of Netlogo and followed it up with a list of ideas he had for spoken tutorials. He also shared a few scripts that he had started working on, but, not completed. Next, Dr. Manojendu gave an introduction to Geogebra and a few ideas for spoken tutorials. It was already noon, by the time we reached the end of the talks and the hands-on part began.
The participants were then divided into groups of three and they chose one topic each, from the pool of ideas to make spoken-tutorials on. We then began working on our scripts. Our group chose, "Introduction to Arrays" in numpy as the topic. I already had some outlines ready, which we worked on improving. It was good to have a novice in our team, who could review the script. But, this tutorial being a part of a series of tutorials was a slight problem for us. We had about 45mins
before we dispersed for lunch.
Post lunch, we had another half-an-hour to forty-five minutes to review finalize our script, and try out some rehearsals of recording. Then began the series of live recordings. Each of the teams were given an opportunity to record their scripts in-front of all the participants. It was an exciting thing for the participants and they were enthusiastic. But, a few of us felt, this was a bit too long and more time could've been spent in the script finalization and rehearsal stage with more critical feedback being given to the participants.
The workshop ended with a few participants giving their feedback. On the whole it was an educative workshop, but I would've liked more critical feedback, with fewer specimens.

• Steps for script writing
  1. Identify the need
  2. Prepare
     1. familiarize self
     2. test all the features
  3. Focus on a key feature that you want to demonstrate
  4. Choice of words
     1. Use short sentences
     2. Use simple words - avoid jargon
     3. Use a combination of screen-cast and slides
     4. Be specific
  5. Follow a pedagogical approach
     1. Brief intro
     2. OS compatibility, system requirements
     3. Show screen-shots of download sites?
     4. Mention pre-requisite knowledge
        Ideally that material should be available as another spoken tutorial
     5. Write ALL steps
     6. REMEMBER - Visual medium - SHOW
  6. Review the script for accuracy and clarity
     1. Ask a novice
     2. Improve until novice can follow until novice can follow
        without help
  7. Review the script for grammar
  8. Time duration
     10 minutes
  9. File size
     ~ 10MB
• Narration - Dos and Don'ts
  1. Speaking
     • politely
     • do not give orders
     • make it a pleasant experience
     • speak naturally
     • speak clearly and slowly
  2. Tips to cut external noise
     • closed room with min. disturbance
     • switching off the fan helps
     • close windows
  3. Dummy rec. for 2-3 mins to finalize rec. parameters
     • predict file-size
     • check clarity of audio narration and video
     • full-length dummy narration will help improve tone of
       voice and pronunciation
  4. Final narration
     • do it in one go
       • keeps tone of voice uniform
       • reduce editing time
  5. While dubbing
     • if possible, remove original audio stream
     • else, just add another stream (not more than 2 streams)
     • audio-video sync
     • meaning should be same
     • file size remains (almost) same
     • recording dimensions

Here is a link to a post by Nancy on the event.