Development of a Mobile Observation Support System for Students: FishWatchr Mini

Development of a Mobile Observation Support System for Students: FishWatchr Mini Masaya Yamaguchi, Masanori Kitamura, and Naomi Yanagida National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Nanzan University, Hitotsubashi University 10-2 Midori-cho, Tachikawa City, Tokyo, Japan; 18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, Japan; 2-1 Naka, Kunitachi City, Tokyo, Japan, masaya@ninjal.ac.jp, mkita@ic.nanzan-u.ac.jp, n.yanagida@r.hit-u.ac.jp Abstract This paper presents a system called FishWatchr Mini (FWM), which supports students in observing and reflecting on educational activi- ties such as presentation practices. Although video annotation systems are supposed to support such activities, especially reflection, they have been used by researchers and teachers outside the classroom, rather than by students inside the classroom. To resolve problems with introducing video annotation systems in the classroom, we propose three solutions: (a) to facilitate preparation of devices, FWM is implemented as a Web application on students’ smartphones; (b) to facilitate students’ learning to use the system, FWM is designed to automate as many operations as possible, apart from annotation; and (c) FWM allows students to examine annotation data through reflection, by providing functions such as visualization. The results of applying FWM to presentation practices in a university validated the effectiveness of FWM in terms of its ease of use and applicability of annotation results. Since annotated video data could also provide language resources for teachers, it is anticipated that they will contribute to improving their classes in the future. Keywords: video annotation tool, real-time annotation, reflection support 1. Introduction Educational activities such as presentation practices, dis- cussion exercises, and trial lessons for trainee teachers have been conducted in university classrooms. These activities include cooperative phases (Barkley et al., 2005; Morimoto and Otsuka, 2012): Together, students observe their practices and reflect on them after the observations. Thus far, many video annotation tools have been devel- oped to observe such activities (Rich and Hannafin, 2009; Yousef et al., 2014) because recorded video and sound are useful tools, particularly for reflecting on practice. Most of these tools, however, have been designed for researchers to make complex annotations (Brugman and Russel, 2004) or for teachers to share videos and comments as web-based systems (Kong et al., 2009; Colasante, 2011). These tools are not suited to students’ real-time annotation and to group reflection in the classroom. In this paper, we developed a system called FishWatchr Mini (FWM), which supports students’ observation and group reflection in the classroom. To validate the effective- ness of FWM, we presented the results of the application to presentation practices in a university setting. We believe that one of the reasons that video annotation systems have not been introduced effectively in the class- room is the stringent condition of the system operation: many students, as observers, make real-time simultaneous annotations and the results of those annotations are then used in the group reflection phase. FWM is designed to address the following three problems related to the introduction of video annotation systems in educational activities in the classroom. The first problem is preparing classroom devices for sys- tems and settings. To introduce annotation systems …

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