Screen Recordings

As I posted for our group discussion, screen recordings are powerful tools for demonstrating use of technology. It seems like the perfect means of teaching students how to use features of Adobe PhotoShop and InDesign, and give them a review of the MS Office programs we use (Word, Excel,PowerPoint). If it's the first time we're implementing blogs, wikis, moodles, webquests, then a screen recorder could introduce use of the technology in the context of our project. We could give them a tour and discuss appropriate parameters for the project using the same tools they'll use to produce their final product. The beauty of this is that learners can go at their own pace and access it at home as well.

Screen recordings would be great for skills that are only used intermittently, but expected in academia. I know that I'd like a quick file review for formatting bibliographies (MLA, APA) and works cited. The method of citing web resources is new to most of us and could easily be explained in a quick screen recording. If your class has a special format for presenting a large project, a screen recording would be a handy way to explain that. Many group project arguments could be averted by having 24-7 access to the teacher's instructions!

I also think that some cognitive skills might be captured in a screen recording. I could use my computer to show how to edit and recast sentences, talking through the thought process as I go along. I could demonstrate methods of scoring a script (a useful tool for dramatic character analysis) and show how different choices affect the characterization and performance. I think high school students could be asked to use screen recordings in their presentations as well. They could share information on "The Making of" their projects from how they used an effect in Moviemaker to explaining how and why they edited things out of their final products. Possibilities abound!

I will try to explore a few of these applications in the upcoming week and make one a part of my final Moodle. Stay tuned.

Using Flickr

I went to a reunion last week and immediately posted my photos to Flickr, inviting the other attendees to join my group and do the same. A few people posted to Facebook despite the fact that not all class members have accounts. A few others cluttered our email inboxes with photo message attachments. No one actually posted to Flickr. I guess I needed to give them the screen recording tour first!! (Hmm...maybe I should have students create FB accounts for fictional characters to demonstrate character and text analysis skills.)

In any case, I can see uses for Flickr in the classroom: from field trips to school events, point-of-view visual rhetoric to storyboarding and a clever way to put together a slide show of some show-n-tell project or billboards of found poetry. On a field trip, different groups could become experts on a specific area of knowledge and take lots of pictures to present to the class as a whole. Or everyone could compare their visual perspective on the same content. Slide shows could be set to music or narration.

I like that students could have easy access at school or at home and that the privacy controls are conducive to the classroom setting.