Screen casting

I have been interested in screencasting and using what screen casts offer for a while but this year really decided that I would try and use them for a variety of analysis and flip-class room projects and then have used socrative to try and gather really anonymous feedback from students about whether they are using them.

I tried screenr to begin with and have found this program to be mostly reliable and very easy to use.  If you create an account it helps as you can then keep all your screencasts together allowing students to return to your stream multiple times.  I have also used screencastomatic which has more mouse options, 15 mins of time limit (screenr has 5 mins) and the ability to directly download your screencast which is a bonus, but have had some processing issues.  Neither of these is faultless and there is nothing worse then having your work disappear after creating a cast!  I have really got great feedback from students and from specialist teachers from the screen casts, and I have used them in the following ways:

1. homework explained – I made short screencasts of the homework of the week for students who were absent or who needed reminding.
2. Lesson summaries – I completed short lesson summaries in our Health classes for students who were absent to assist them with their catching up.  I emailed this to them, posted it on our wiki and also sent it to our EAL and Learning support teachers and sometimes parents!
3. assignments explained – I explained the assignments, wiki pages, emails etc. to the students who had to try and go through my convoluted assignments (I am great at too much!)
4. feedback – I have used screencasts to give feedback to students.  I have done this primarily over their performance videos (eg. dance or gymnastics) to allow me to pause their work and explain parts along the way – I actually had a few kids demand their screencasts one morning when I was late to post them up the night before!
5. Summative Assessment – i gave students a volleyball game video from You tube of a junior girls’ team in the USA and asked them to commentate the play.  This went with an assignment detailing key words etc. and it was a great way to see if my students actually got what was happening and could see how the play was progressing from offense/defence and looking at body position and timing.  Very powerful assignments.
6. Formative assessment – we had aTouch Rugby test and I gave each student group a set of rules from our game play and asked them to make a screencast about the rules.  We then used these for checking that we all understood and then shared them with the other classes to use a study guide.

If you are interested, here is my screenr screencast list.