Original post by Victoria on September 11, 2013
Screencasting is going to be a major player in the future of education. There are already thousands of screencasts produced daily explaining the how-to, the what-is, and the why of… well, everything! That leads me to my mobile app of choice for screencasting: Explain Everything. This is an iOS app (and coming soon on Android) allows your learners to record themselves, add in digital media, annotate, and otherwise create a visible learning process. Before submitting the screencast, the student is highly likely to review their creation (if it is not already a necessity from the teacher), thus creating a powerful tool for students to assess their own ability to communicate ideas and learning. It’s like watching game-film for your learning processes!
Some examples of empowering student work can include but are certainly not limited to:
– creation of student problems for one another, then work to solve them using varying methods
– projects can take on a life of their own because of the ability to import any piece of digital information into a presentation format and manipulate it just as you need it
– reading: decoding, fluency, and self-monitoring can be assessed by the student before assessed by adults
For teachers, this tool has allowed some to flip the classroom, create meaningful infographics and slideshows linked to class content, and even communicate with parents more efficiently.
This article tells us a little more about why Explain Everything is a “must-have for iPad”: http://www.newschooltechnology.org/2013/02/explain-everything/
Also a great video on the Explain Everything website that shows the power of the tool: http://www.explaineverything.com/
Average: 4.9/5 Stars
Screencasting has been incredibly useful, especially when explaining “How to” using devices (typically on laptops, iPads). Many of the replies from the original post had similar sentiments. Many devices now have the capability to screencast, without the 3rd party app. Many of these screencasts are helpful for users to attempt DIY solutions – I remember creating a series of “How to” for my colleagues and students when they may encounter technical difficulties. Many of my colleagues and students provided positive feedback, indicating that they found it to be useful and effective rather than a series of written or oral instructions that they may have received in the past.
Hi Jungwhan, you are right in saying that screencasts are incredibly useful. I have used them so often in the last three years that I have lost count of exactly how many I’ve done and like you all those I have shared those videos with have found them useful. I’ve also made use of Explain Everything (it was one of the first options I tried out when I decided I wanted to make such videos for my students)- it worked fantastically well and is very intuitive. There are even cloud based apps these days that one can use (screenapp.io). Just out of curiosity- is there any feature or function that you would like to see added to these screencast technologies that you think could make them even better? One feature that I wish I could control is the quality of the video recording. I haven’t found an easy way to adjust the quality or compression of the video size and so I have to go through others apps after creating the screencast to scale down large video files into sizes that could make them not only downloadable with wifi or internet data but also mobile data if needed by my students.
Hi Carla,
Thanks for your question. I agree that the ability to adjust the quality and size of the video would be a much-needed feature. We (myself and my students) struggled – both uploading the screencast videos and downloading them due to infrastructure and the features of our district intranet. I am certainly aware that different apps exists (it is possible that some apps may have such features to compress and shrink the size), but I am hesitant to use them due to privacy issues. There is also the equity issue as you have brought up the issue of mobile data – not all students have access to internet at home which makes it challenging.