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