Screencasting

This seems like such a great tool for anyone who needs to teach and use computers quite a bit. As I read through John Udell observations about what is screencasting, I was blown away by the different generes and things that you could do with this screencasting. The first thing that popped into my head was the How-to genre. A couple things quickly came to mind. First, last year my school bought an online learning system for extended learning and credit recovery. This program although not overly complicted was new to many students and caused quite a few problems for the students. If we have a screencast set up to show them the ropes this would be much easier. You would certainly have to break it down into different parts but that is possible and would make it easier. I would probably start with logging into the program, aftet that is mastered i would certainly go into the meat and potatoes of it and show what the program can do, this portion would be the most important and would have to go into great detail. i also had another idea in the how-to genre, it would be a how-to pass this class. It would certainly work best in a computer class of some kind but at the end of a year or trimester the kids in the class would make a screencast on how to pass the class that would be given to the kids next year. This would be a great review tool for the kids and will show them just how much they learned. For example maybe you did a unit on power point, they would then create a screencast showing all the stuff that learned on power point. Then the next year you have a tool to either get the kids excited about what they are going to learn or can be used as a pretest for what they already know.

Another genre that i thought was great was Animated whiteboard. I would use this for my basketball team as a study tool for them to learn plays. The play could be drawn on the whiteboard with my explanation behind the drawing, they then could listen to this to prepare for games. They probably don't want to hear my voice more then they already do, however it could be a great tool. They could even make there own plays and then present them to the team to see if we want to use them. It is a great interactive tool for learning.

The last genre that I like was the software demo, this would certainly need to be for very high level classes, but you could give them certain software to look over and learn about, they would then have to do the voice over of what they like and didn't like about the software. This could be a very powerful lesson because they would have to think critically about what they like and don't like about the software. If you put everyone on the same software, you could probably get some really great discussion going because there will be parts the some people think are great, and others think need improvements.