Saturday, October 31, 2009

Screencasting for Learning




In the two streams of teaching I am responsible for screencasting is accessed, or used by all students. In the IT class it is modelled and taught through Smart Recorder, iMovie, with the end products differing.

With Smart Recorder students develop a screencast that will teach other skills within programs such as Excel, or Word. It takes a sound knowledge of the subject to show, while at the same time confidently tell, how to import images, or make and label a bar graph. For many students it took a number of attempts to be satisfied that it was an effective teaching tool. These screencasts are saved in a file that is able to be accessed by each incoming class.

iMovie was a more open ended project and allowed creativity in combining images to tell about one of their passions. Because it was not content driven the students had a lot of fun, and freedom to choose images and music that appealed to them.

In the Humanities classes, screencasting is used by teachers and students. The teacher generated screencasts from Notebook software or SmartRecording can all be used as an all class teaching tool, as a reference for those who need review, and for students who are absent. In a co- teaching and EAP situation that I work in - it is perfect to view in small segments.


Students all have used Smart Recording for novel review, and geography terms. These have been uploaded to YouTube and onto blogs for sharing. Some students have worked with iMovie to bring to life novels, and have motivated others to experiment. There continue to be many other ways and programs to introduce and use screencasts and those are next on my list.

There's about 200 milliion websites today and there will be more tomorrow.

Five Mind-Blowing Web Stats You Should Know

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