I have a confession to make. I’m obsessed with screencasting. Ob.sessed. In all honesty, I think this instructional strategy has been the single most transformative element in my teaching in the past five years. Seriously. How bout that for a high bar to set for one measly piece of software?
Screencasting as How-To:
Some describe screencasting mostly as something you'd use for giving a how-to of something on your screen. It’s true - this can be really useful to tighten up the workflow in a course, to get everyone on the same virtual page, or to answer a question once that you would otherwise answer individually a bunch of times. Take for example the video below. Last year, my school switched learning management systems, and my students started to freak out about how to turn their work in from the app we ask them to use. So I made a screencast showing them the process. I taught 40 students last year, so the fact that the video has over 120 views suggests a few things to me: either students went back to the video a few times to get clarity, or (more likely from what I’ve heard) they shared the video with other students at our school with the same problem. Not only did I save myself the wasted class time of repeating instructions, but I probably also saved some of my colleagues from the same headache. Sweet!
Screencasting as Instruction:
You’re probably wondering: how on earth was this transformative for your teaching? Honestly, it wasn’t. How-to screencasting is convenient, but at its core, it doesn’t help me to rethink the way I use class time. Where screencasting has been totally revolutionary for me is in the area of flipped instruction (flipped teaching, or blended learning, is an instructional practice in which guided practice is done in class and some portion of instruction is delivered as homework).
Back in 2011, when I was teaching with 1:1 iPads for the first time, I started experimenting with creating mini-videos to answer some of the repeat questions I was getting in class. Students were asking about how to structure an academic paragraph, and even though I had gone over it a number of times in class, I still seemed to get mediocre writing and perplexed faces each time we wrote another paragraph. I thought maybe a review video would help. I assigned the video as homework, and when class started the next day, a couple of my students asked me (half joking, half serious) why I hadn’t just explained it that way in the first place. Good question! Why hadn’t I? Well, I suppose I always thought that the teacher was supposed to, you know, teach during class. My students gave me license to rethink what constituted school work and what constituted homework. They liked being able to listen to my lessons multiple times when needed, and appreciated being able to pause me, rewind me, slow me down, or make me give my entire lesson all over again. My second year of teaching 1:1 with iPads was when I moved to a fully flipped model for my writing instruction. Below is one of my writing screencasts in case you are interested:
Back in 2011, when I was teaching with 1:1 iPads for the first time, I started experimenting with creating mini-videos to answer some of the repeat questions I was getting in class. Students were asking about how to structure an academic paragraph, and even though I had gone over it a number of times in class, I still seemed to get mediocre writing and perplexed faces each time we wrote another paragraph. I thought maybe a review video would help. I assigned the video as homework, and when class started the next day, a couple of my students asked me (half joking, half serious) why I hadn’t just explained it that way in the first place. Good question! Why hadn’t I? Well, I suppose I always thought that the teacher was supposed to, you know, teach during class. My students gave me license to rethink what constituted school work and what constituted homework. They liked being able to listen to my lessons multiple times when needed, and appreciated being able to pause me, rewind me, slow me down, or make me give my entire lesson all over again. My second year of teaching 1:1 with iPads was when I moved to a fully flipped model for my writing instruction. Below is one of my writing screencasts in case you are interested:
Screencasting on the Fly
The best thing for me about screencasting is that -- once you get the hang of it -- it is relatively easy to do. Just this past weekend, I was reviewing my students’ essays in progress (because we flip our writing instruction, my students now write during class in shared Google Docs, and I use my preps to give them feedback during the writing process. Thanks, screencasting!). A number of my students posted questions in their docs about a particular practice in analytical essay writing. After seeing the same question a couple of times, I thought they weren’t paying attention. Then, I saw the question fourteen or fifteen times. That was one of those classic “it’s not you, it’s me” teacher moments. I needed to give my students a brief lesson on analysis, but I really needed to give the lesson before our next class. They were editing over the weekend, and they needed the feedback. So, I threw together a screencast. My go-to method is to create a google slide deck and record it. The one embedded below took me around a half hour from start to finish to create, record, and upload. Screencasting is just that flexible.
Ok, fine. I’ll admit it. I freaking love screencasting. And I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about what makes for a successful screencast. My writing partner, Jen, and I included a chapter in our book about rethinking class time… and a section of how to effectively create your own online content. I’m excerpting a passage below because it outlines my approach to creating screencasts, and may be useful to you, too:
Creating your Own Online Content
(from Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and LEarning)
For any videos we create—the most frequent being a screencast recording of a slide deck—we go through the same process and follow similar design rules.
- Create a concept map.What do you need your students to understand, and how can you explain that concept in a meaningful way? We like to start by determining a story arc, angle, or metaphor to connect students to content.
- Storyboard.The slides in the slide deck are fabulous for this purpose. We label the slides with key points for starters, and then we go back and fill in with images, words, and details.
- Write the script. We strongly suggest having a script. We know teachers who can record themselves talking off the cuff and have it sound totally polished. But most of us ramble without a script, and rambling leads to unnecessarily long videos. Generally, any video that tops seven minutes is likely too long for a teenager’s attention span. We use the slide notes section to write what we want to say about each slide in the presentation while we are recording.
- Design your visuals. Our general rule for slides is that they need to be simple, clear, and contain an anchoring image to ground the story. We like to find images through photosforclass.com, and we use only images that are Creative Commons licensed, in the public domain, or photographs we took ourselves. Try to keep words to a minimum, unless you are analyzing a chunk of text. In that case, consider highlighting specific words and phrases with a contrasting color or font. If you are new to presentation design, we recommend picking up a copy of Presentation Zen (Reynolds 2012) or his follow-up book, Presentation Zen Design (Reynolds 2014). Slide:ology is also a great resource (Duarte 2008).
- Do a run-through. Talk out your slides at least once before recording to make sure the images and script match, and that the words flow well.
- Record! Launch your screencasting software, select the area of the slide on your screen, and click the red “record” button. When you are finished recording, check the video to make sure everything looks and sounds okay. Then post it where your students can find it, and link to it on your learning management system.