Screencast-o-matic

So this year was the year of the great e-portfolio shift in my pedagogy. I've used them for the last three years, but this year, I've been able to embed it much more holistically into my classroom program as we've had all four members of our level team on board to develop, trial, review and assess elements of the platform.

I'll do a post on our platform - EduPLEX by OzInterbiz - another time, but today I want to share a Web 2.0/3.0 tool I was encouraged to become familiar with by our outsource instructor, George Sorgi. We had a lot of instructional videos at our fingertips to embed into our portfolio artifact pages, but not one for a graphic manipulation tool we wanted to use, so George suggested I make one. I had seen my Virtual Teacher instructors on Coursera use software where they could play their presentation and talk to it, recording it for us to stream later, and they had briefly mentioned that it would be useful for us to learn to use said software, but they'd never gone into much detail about what to use, or how to go about making a good video.

Screencast-o-matic has a free online version of its software that you can use for just such a purpose! Prepare your presentation by whatever method you like, then load up Screencast-o-matic, and talk to it while you record - voila! Well, not quite voila - it took me nearly two hours to make my first, very short video. Since then, I've become a bit more streamlined in how I go about making videos - I make a running sheet of what I need to cover (usually in point form on the back of an envelope!), practice once and then record. I try to make sure I'm ready to record it in the evening, as the mic picks up background sound very easily (as you'll hear in my example below!).

Feedback I've had from my students has been positive! It took a few of them a little bit before they paused it, took off their headphones and, looking at me with big eyes, asked "Ang, is that YOU??" as they are used to hearing George or one of the other instructors on the videos. It's been a great tool for testing whether they can extrapolate instructions about one task and apply it to another, too, as the examples in the videos are showing how to use functions on the tools, not complete the artifacts themselves.

This was my first Screencast-o-matic video, explaining how to create a graphic using SketchPad. Enjoy!