Screencasting for the Classroom: Teacher and Student Uses

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence
--Thomas Hood

It's that time of year again. The excitement of Halloween has passed and the cold, dark and wet wait for the Christmas season has begun. A nasty cold has been descending on me all day. I write accompanied by a box of Kleenex and a hot lemon tea. Nonetheless, I persevere on my Web 2.0 quest in the face of such adversity!

Although my experiment to use Jing to assess student work is not yet complete, I have been gathering ideas about how screencasting can be used in a classroom setting.

For Teachers:

• to create "how to" instructions for using technology
  
• to create a narrated guide to useful websites
• to assess student work with commentary rather than pen marks
• to narrate visual tours (with Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.) (Richardson, 2010, p. 123)
• to provide think alouds about the writing process or other learning process up on the screen
  

For Students (very similar to how teachers would use it):

• to create mini-lessons for classmates on everything from math problems, to grammar, to using Web tools
  
• to create their own guided internet tours (Richardson, 2010, p. 123)
• to narrate stories or poetry with accompanying visuals (Richardson, 2010, p. 123)
  
• to provide self assessment of their own work / writing. With their assignment up on the screen, they could discuss what they perceive as their strengths and the areas that need more work, and they could also reflect on the thinking process that went in terms of doing the assignment (meta-cognition).

What is particularly useful about Jing is you (or your students) can provide a link to the appropriate screencast in an email, or it can be embedded it in a class blog, wiki or moodle.

Whereas I am a high school English/Socials teacher, my colleague in learning, Joclyn Beliveau, is a primary teacher and she has her own post here on how screencasting can be used in the classroom. She connects the higher-order thinking required to create a screencast to Bloom's Taxonomy - excellent! Definitely worth the read.

References

Beliveau, J. (2011, October 31). Screencasting - taking thinking to a higher order [web log post]. Retrieved from http://techtasticteaching.blogspot.com/2011/10/screencasting-taking-thinking-to-higher.html

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousands Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Up and Running, Jing Style

Never before in history has innovation offered the promise of so much to so many in so short a time. --Bill Gates.

This week's goal is to continue exploring Jing, particularly with respect to using screencasts to assess student work. I discussed the idea of using Jing for student assessment in a recent post.

Because I am working at an online school, providing feedback in this more personalized format could replicate having a teacher-student conference. To that end, I have emailed a couple of my students for permission to share this experiment on my blog (with the understanding that I will not refer to their names anywhere).

While I wait to hear back, let's take a broader look at Jing and its possibilities in the classroom. Will Richardson (2010), ed-tech guru, writes that screencasting is "a relatively new medium that...has a lot of promise in the classroom" (p. 123).

This YouTube video shows how simple, yet innovative, Jing's concept is:



Here are two additional resources for getting started with Jing:

1) Chapter 8 of Web 2.0 Tools in Education (thanks to my classmate, Joclyn Beliveau for sharing this link)
2) This detailed screencast tutorial from an ESL teacher at TeacherTrainingVideos.com

Although these tutorials provide orientations to Jing, I find the program very well-designed and intuitive to use. I didn't need much "google it" help to set up Jing and start using it. It was easy as 1,2,3! What I did discover, and I blogged about it last week, was that creating a polished screencast that demonstrates how to use a web tool will take some planning, as well as trial and error.

In the next post, I will explore potential uses for Jing for both students and teachers.


References:

ChannelTechSmith (2011, October 25). Jing overview video [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5FLsSUTFYyw

Embi, M. A. (2011). Web 2.0 tools in education: A quick guide. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/58594601/Web-2-0-Tools-in-Education-A-Quick-Guide-by-Mohamed-Amin-Embi

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousands Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Stannard, Russell (n.d.). How to use Jing screen capture tool [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/Jing/index.html

Using Shortcuts in Google Reader

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --Leonardo da Vinci

Google Reader is an essential tool for decluttering your online workspace. I now have 35 subscriptions in Google Reader, most of which are related to my Masters degree, with a few personal interest blogs thrown in there for good measure.

This post on Gigaom highlights a few ways to get the most out of using Google Reader. I tried out the suggested keyboard shortcuts. These are a few that I like:

Shift+? = a list of shortcuts
j = move to next item
k = move to previous item
space bar = page down
f = full screen mode
v = view original post

Because I am in the habit of saving useful blog posts to Diigo, I haven't been using the star (press s) function. However, I may try it out to highlight posts that need a more careful read.

I also checked out my "Trends" for the first time. Very interesting. Free Technology for Teachers is my "most read" blog, along with the blogs of my classmates. Blue Skunk and Cool Cat Teacher also rate up there. What else is getting my attention? Cute overload. I can't seem to help myself.

References

Foster, D. (2010, September 10). 5 tips for getting the most out of Google reader [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://gigaom.com/collaboration/5-tips-for-getting-the-most-out-of-google-reader/

Screencasting...Bruised, but not Beaten

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship. --Louisa May Alcott

I sat down this morning to create my first 5 minute screencast using Jing. I figured it would take me a couple hours to get it done and blog about it. Four hours later, I finally have something to show for myself.

Screencasting seems simple enough. Jing captures a video of your screen as you talk through using a web tool. I wanted to show my English 12 students how to set up a wiki using pbworks.com for their independent novel study. How hard can it be?

Well, the tool is easy to use, but screencasting is not, at least not the first time you do it. First, everything has to run smoothly on your computer. For example, I was setting up a demo account, so the activation email had to arrive immediately, and if it didn't, I had to start again. If you misspeak, you have to start again. If you click on the wrong buttons, you have to start again. If you run out of time, you have to start again. And finally, after you finally get it right, if you hit cancel instead of stop, you will pull out your hair, and have to start again.

I discovered five minutes go by really quickly. I had to break my screencast in two in order to show the kids what they needed to know.

This first screencast took about ten attempts:



I am very relieved to report that the second screencast only took me two attempts:



My screencasts are now safely embedded in Moodle for the Grade 12s and I think I need to go have a coffee!

P.S. If you place your mouse over the screencast as it is running, you can click on the tiny yellow computer screen icon at the bottom far right corner, and it will go to full screen mode so you can see it more clearly.

Getting up to Speed with Goodreads

I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street. --Virginia Woolf

And sometimes, there seems to be an inability to find them online!

A small confession to begin: in order to obtain the screenshots for this post, I cheated a little. I started using a web tool I'm not officially planning to explore until later in the project. Jing. Yes, I downloaded Jing and within five minutes was doing screen captures and editing them. Oh, so simple. And surprisingly fun!

However, to return to the topic of this post, I've had a very productive 'play-date' with Goodreads today. I started out by adding and rating twenty books for my bookshelf so I could check out the recommendation system. The results are so-so. By sifting through the results, I did find a few suggestions to put on my to-read list, including some interesting educational titles. However, if you rate the occasional book that isn't your standard reading-fare, it will throw the recommendations off and you will find yourself checking lists of books that would never appeal to you. I suspect finding books to read would be more easily and accurately done by following or friending a person with similar tastes to you.

One very positive feature I discovered today is that there are many authors who seem to be actively using the site and you can become a "fan" and follow their activity, such as updates, blog posts and the books they review. You can even send them messages. I discovered this when I noticed, in a long list of reviews by users, a review by a name I recognized: Greg Mortensen, the co-author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones to Schools. I was quite interested to see that he is rating and reviewing books just like the rest of us! As a result of this discovery, I've "fanned" two authors I like and I will see where this leads over the next few weeks.

One down side of this social cataloguing site so far is that I'm finding it hard to connect with anyone. (Sadly, I still have no friends.). I tried the Facebook "friend search" method again, and this time disabled Goodreads' ability to post on my behalf. I did find one Facebook acquaintance using Goodreads and I sent her a "please be my friend" message. Then I sent pleading emails to two "real-life" friends who are avid readers to please join the site. After all, if you don't have any friends, who is going to read your reviews? Whose bookshelves are you going to check out? Goodreads, without any friends, is a lonely place!

To finish off this week's web journey, my bookshelves are now populated and three reviews are complete. During this coming week, I'll investigate discussions and groups, as well as Goodreads in the classroom.

Getting to Know Goodreads

I can't tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family, it's like going to somebody else's Christmas dinner, everyone knows everyone, and you're there and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing. --John Cleese

Yes, learning a new web tool is somewhat like arriving to a fancy Christmas Dinner late. The food is enticing, the guests are friendly, but you somehow you feel awkward and displaced. And besides, what is that dish, anyways?

One of the first steps Goodreads asks you to complete is to "find friends" via Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and some other options. I opted not to do this step at all when I noticed Goodreads wanted to search my contact list at Gmail (which seemed a little dubious), and also and more alarmingly, post to Facebook and Twitter 'on my behalf'. I feel very uncomfortable letting anybody but me post to my accounts. So, I guess I don't have any friends for the time being, and it raised some interesting questions for me about internet privacy and security.

Not wanting to feel defeated, I ventured further and started setting up my bookshelf. One of the first books I added was "One Day" by David Nicholls--a book with which I have a love/hate relationship. It asked immediately for a review, which I wasn't yet prepared to write. However, I was very impressed when I noticed how many people had rated and reviewed the book. Over 30,000 ratings and 7,000 reviews! This site is certainly generating a lot of traffic. I added a few more books and and simple ratings to my bookshelf before going on edit my profile. There is plenty to add in the profile, including places to list favourite authors and to vote on favourite books on Listopia. I also added a widget to my blog to show books I have read and rated. There is even an option to automatically post your book reviews to your blog, but I decided not to do that.

I'm looking forward to trying a new feature at GoodReads, the recommendation system, which requires members to rate at least 20 books before it generates a list of novel suggestions. I found an interesting blog at the New Yorker in which writer Macy Halford (2011) gives the recommendation feature a mixed review, arguing that although it generates some good suggestions, it doesn't take into account that "[b]ooks are messy and the reasons humans like them are messier". I'll have to try it out for myself.

Aside from the recommendation system, there is much more to explore at this site: exclusive interviews with authors, many well written reviews, discussions to join about the books I've put on my bookshelf, and groups to join. This last topic will be explored in more detail next week.

REFERENCES

Halford, M. (2011, September 19). Getting good at Goodreads [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/getting-good-at-goodreads-1.html