Screencasting - Taking Teaching on the Road

A new tool that I've been playing around with this week is screencasting. Although it's undoubtedly true that nothing can ever replace direct instruction, I certainly feel like we can make it more personalized (and portable!) with technology.

I found two excellent uses for screen casting this week that just tickled my students pink.

Tutorials and Lectures

Although I've used Educreations in the past to create tutorials "flipped-classroom"-style, I was always frustrated by the fact that it was limited to a white-board-like screen, a finger acting as a marker, and whatever images you took the time to drag into the frame. (And if you wanted text, such as a worksheet, you had to screenshot it or make it an image first. Ugh.)

An Educreations tutorial I made for poetry

Although I know teachers who use Educreations to thunderous applause from students (the social studies teacher next door to me last year was a HUGE hit when she put her lectures into this format), it is fairly tough to use with the English Language Arts classroom. I don't know about you-all, but I don't do a whole lot of lecturin'.

This week, I had to make a screencast for class, and it set off a little lightbulb in my head. Rather than showing students on the projector how to use a certain website, for example, and getting assaulted with questions later ("What did you say again?"), why not record the instructions and inject a little humor?

To introduce to them a new vocabulary site I wanted to use, I made a tutorial using QuickTime, which I then uploaded directly to Edmodo for them to access. Since you obviously can't access their Edmodo class, here's a condensed version of what I gave to students. (Please note and forgive my sarcasm-- I promise, the students are in no way emotionally scarred by my gentle verbal ribbing).

My students were cracking up as they watched this. One commented, "She talks to that just like she talks to us!" I can guarantee they were more engaged than they would have been if I had just pulled up the site on my laptop and projected it while I talked. The students got really into the new site I was modeling and wanted to log on right away to start using it for their vocabulary homework.

• Cool discovery, by the way-- I had so much trouble figuring out where to upload my enormous QuickTime file that I finally remembered about Screencast-O-Matic, an amazing site that lets you easily record and store screencasts for your students.

Conferences, Sans Me

The other cool way I got to use screencasting this week was by using it to record myself making comments and giving feedback on their PowerPoint projects. I went through the project slide by slide, made suggestions, and avoided telling them their grade-- purely comments and suggestions. Then, I emailed the link to students to watch outside of class. No homework requirement necessary-- once students saw that there was a personalized video waiting, they were more than excited to have our one-on-one conference (well, if you can still call it that when I'm not really there physically).

A screen shot of a video I used to give feedback on a project

I never would have had time to meet with each student in our very short classes, so this was a perfect solution, tailored to my schedule and my students'. (And it was just a little fun for both of us).

Best of all? I actually had students emailing me back, thanking me for my feedback. How great is that?