Thing 19: Screencasting

I am so excited about learning how to do a screencast! There have often been times in my fifth grade class when I’ve demonstrated how to do something and as soon as the students are asked to do it on their own, everyone’s hands go up. In the past, I’ve tried to troubleshoot this by creating a step-by-step list. This wasn’t always the most effective method because some students still didn’t get it. Now that I know how to create a screencast, I plan to create a link to it and make it readily available so that the students can go back to it if needed. The first screencast I plan to create is a tutorial on how to create a Work Cited on EasyBib.

I have decided to create a screencast on using Wordle, a Web 2.0 tool that I think will be very useful in my classroom. Students can create Wordle’s to summarize a book that they have read, we can create Wordle’s as a way to review concepts taught in a certain unit, and much more. It is basically a word cloud that is created using any text that you provide. I have decided to brainstorm a list of words summarizing my experience with this wonderful professional development opportunity and create a screencast of that.



Probably the most difficulty I had with creating the screencast was keeping it under 5 minutes, which is the maximum amount of time I am given. I had to re-do my screencast several times so that it fit into the time constraint. I also just realized that for some reason, the microphone did not work while I was creating my screencast. I've checked all of my settings and re-recorded the screencast, but am still not getting any sound. I don't know why this is occurring.