As a School Librarian I more often helped teachers with technology than I did students. With our busy schedules it was difficult at times to get together, so screencasting offered a way to teach tech when it was convenient for everyone. Tools for screencasting have vastly improved over the years, and Screencastify is so easy to use it would be easy to build a complete technology training library in a very short time!

My Screencast Tutorial

Since I’m now retired and have little contact with teachers and students, I decided my screencast would be something the folks in this JumpStart course might be able to use. One Edublogs feature is a sidebar to which we can add various “widgets,” including one that lists links to other websites. Because these links aren’t tied to any particular blog post, they can be a group of helpful websites available at any time for ourselves or our students. My screencast shows how easy it is to create a set of links and add them to the sidebar.

My .mp4 video is ~4.5 minutes long and shows how I created a new Link Category called Good Ed Tech Websites, added a few links to some of my favorite technology gurus, and then added the Link Category to my blog sidebar so the links are listed there.

Rather than a simple screenshot of my video, I’ve embedded it here in this blog post.

The video is online in my YouTube account, but is unlisted so a person needs to have the link in order to view it there.

Another Way to Use Screencasting

When I was working as a School Librarian, I created screencasts to show students how to search for a book with the online catalog and how to self-checkout a book on the circulation computer. I also made screencasts to show them how to use some of our online informational databases for research projects. We had a high transition among our school population, so these screencasts were very valuable for new students.

One suggestion from this module that really appeals to me is making a screencast of a slide presentation. While slide software now has the capability of narrated presentations, those are real computer memory hogs and often the animation doesn’t transfer very well to online services. A screencast accomplishes the same thing using far less computer memory for storage and the animation is portrayed the way we (the authors) intended. Since I’m recreating my Library Lessons for my TeachersPayTeachers store, I intend to use this technique to make some ‘prepackaged‘ slide presentations available online.

Advanced

I recently used the ‘scripted’ recordings feature of Screencastify to create a set of 5 video tutorials—ranging from 4½ to 8½ minutes each—for an online job I have. By first writing a script, then recording the audio portion, and then recording the video portion I was able to cover some detailed procedures in a step-by-step manner. The scripted feature enabled me to redo and improve certain sections without having to redo the entire video.