Research Hacks - Short videos to help academics work smarter and maximise their impact and reach

As part of the App Swap Breakfast series I run at The University of Sheffield I was introduced to a brilliant free app by Adobe called Voice. The app allows users to create short snappy animations with royalty free images and music. It was just the kind of tool I'b been looking for as many of the animation tools I'd been using were good but often took more time and effort than I could afford. The app allows users to create story-boarded videos easily and simply and then upload them to such as YouTube. It is incredibly quick and simple with the average one minute video taking about 10 minutes to record and upload. It helps to write a script first so that you can see in advance where you can break the video up into scenes. 



I'd been wanting to make a series of short videos to help academics make the most out of the many technologies freely available to them to communicate, collaborate and discover content. The series of videos titled; 'ScHARR Research Hacks' now contains about 24 videos, most of which are about one minute long in duration. Their aim is to explain a very simple idea or technology to help researchers and students. It does not teach you how to use the technologies mentioned but hopefully gives good reason as to why academics and students should at least explore new ways of working.

The entire collection can be found below and will also appear on the University of Sheffield's iTunes U platform at some point later this year.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1mJ7IZ3qFxjR8HhL9HX-ETHUFJz639Bt

Below are a couple of the videos to explore, they only take a minute, so what have you got to lose?


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