Information Overloaded

I have been working with a teacher at one of our schools with 1:1 laptop program and we were trying to come up with ways the students could use screencasts in Language Arts. Screencasting is all about showing, not just telling. This medium allows students to quickly produce a video of what they know.

So, I put my thinking cap on, and here are some ideas I came up with:

1) Students could brainstorm ideas during the pre-writing process using Smart notebook and record themselves explaining their thoughts as they write them down. This would give teachers insight into how students are organizing their thoughts and writing.

2) During a poetry unit, teachers could make quick screencasts of the structure of various poems and students could use them as a reference. For example, if you are teaching students how to write a haiku, you could explain, through the screencast, the poem’s structure and rhyme scheme.

3) Teachers could create screencasts to model reading comprehension strategies; the teacher could bring up a piece of text on the computer and record themselves reading and talking about the strategies they are using to understand the piece they are reading.

4) Teachers and students could screencasts on grammar rules and ways to punctuate. They could record themselves annotating sentences in a word document or in Smart Notebook.

5) Teachers could screencast themselves marking student writing. Students could watch the screencast in order to understand how they were evaluated and why. This type of evaluation would be very comprehensive, but would be somewhat time consuming.

Can anybody else think of ways teachers and students could use screencasting in Language Arts classes? I would love to hear from you!

You have got to watch this video that one of the Grade 8 students made today. All he needed was his laptop, a microphone, Smartboard Recorder and his script. We are gathering all the videos and putting them on a wikispace so teachers and students can benefit from them. It took him 30 minutes to write his script and get his moves in order….and 10 minutes to record!

http://thelearningfactory.wikispaces.com (click on the math link on the left)

Click here to watch the video.

Today I worked with two Grade 8 boys to create screencasts of mental math strategies they are learning in class. I thought I would work with two of them so I could create some experts and also see what the best way would be to introduce screencasting to the whole class.

We are hoping to put the videos on a wikispace so other students can use the how-to videos to review math concepts.  Our site will feature studetnts teaching students.

When they came in one student was already familiar with creating screencasts using Cam Studios. Both of them knew what screencasting was, and all that was needed was my 5 minute explanation and they were off to the races.

One boy discovered that his windows media player would not open his test file. So he found out that by importing the .avi file into Moviemaker, he could preview it and edit.

They took the remainder of the 50 minute class to write their script and set up smart notebook with items from the gallery, text, and different slides. Tomorrow they are going to record using the Smart Notebook Recorder.

What a great way to incorporate literacy into math class. The boys were using procedure writing to explain their math concepts. One realized the need for visuals. He was teaching his strategy using apple and bathtub photos.

I will post them once they are finished. I can’t wait to see how they will turn out!

I have recently been experimenting with screencasting (taking a video of your screen in order to instruct) and have come to some very startlingly frustrating conclusions:

1) I love Jing Project, but I hate the file output format. I don’t know what I am suppose to do with an .swf file. The whole point of a screencast is to instruct people, and if nobody has the player for swf, what good is screencasting in Jing?

2) There are very few free file converters out there that will convert .swf to a more user-friendly file format. I personally could not find one. If there is anyone out there that knows of one, please let me know

3) My new favorite screencasting program is Cam Studios. I tried it out and loved it. It’s not as pretty as Jing, but does the trick, and makes my movie an .avi file which is easily converted.

Sorry Jing, but until you change your output format, I’m not interested in using your software.