Assessment via Screencast.... Check!

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out. --James Bryant Conant

This morning I got the go-ahead from one of my students to share my first stab at using a screencast to provide student feedback and assessment. Here it is!

I liked the way I was able to talk through the paper and give the student more feedback than I would by way of handing/emailing back an edited paper with comments. (Keep in mind all my students are online.) I am hopeful that this form of feedback will help emphasize the "big ideas" in terms of what I am looking for in an essay. I tried to make it clear what I'd like to see in the next paper... I suppose I'll have to wait and see what happens.

Doing assessment via screencast takes a bit more energy. You have to take a good look at the assignment, then step back and plan out the main points you want to make in your screencast. I wrote a point form script for this first one I did. I'll probably save this method for important assignments or something a specific student has submitted that I really want to talk about. However, I also noticed that it is easier to make some points by talking about them rather than writing in the margin or on a rubric.

For an online school, this method of providing feedback is a no-brainer. But, it has its place in the regular classroom as well. We've all been in the situation where we're handing back an assignment when the bell is about to go. You've spent hours slavishly commenting on each student's work. Yet, as the students rush out the door, you see them stuffing the assignment into their binder and, with a sinking heart, you realize those comments will probably never see the light of day.

Perhaps an email to the student with a link to your comments would be more a more effective way to share feedback than the typical situation I describe above. Just an idea...

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

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.