Is It Possible For All Students To Make Screencasts?
Beverly High School is a 1 to 1 school for technology. Students are required to have a laptop. If
students purchase their MacBook Air through the school, the students have the benefit of having access to all of the applications and programs that BHS has licenses to, such as QuickTime. Almost all students chose this route.
How I Would Use Screencasts...
What I think would work with my classroom and teaching style would be for students to use this for reviews for mid terms and finals.
I would make a master list of all the major topics we have covered for the exam. I would let students chose their topic they feel comfortable teaching. There can only be one student per topic. If two students wanted the same topic we would use the only fair way to decide--Best out of 3 for rocks, paper, scissors. (Although I do wonder if in some sense it would be better if I assigned a topic to students, particularly one I know they struggled with, to force them to learn it. But I also want them to feel comfortable teaching...*deep thoughts by Lauren*) Students will create a tutorial on their assigned topic, reteaching all of their peers.
What applications are required?
Students could then use QuickTime which is already loaded onto their computers to make a screencast. The one draw back I could find with QuickTime is that there is no white board app with it. I think QuickTime is more for guiding through how to use a website, etc. (Our tech department often sends out screen casts to show how to post quarter grades, for example.)
Students could download a paint app (What happened to the days when this was standard on every computer?) or, they could access a free white board website. I found one, https://awwapp.com/, that I like because it also has dots in the background which is ideal for math to make graphs. There is a paid version, but the free version will suffice.
Other ideas to make this assignments successful would be to remind students they have graphing calculators on their laptops or to also access the website desmos. Both are great for graphing.
How do you use QuickTime and awwapp.com?
QuickTime was unbelievably simple to use and figure out. Once in QuickTime you have 3 options...
New Audio Recording is just that. A recording of your voice, no video.
New Screen Recording will be a recording of what you are doing on your screen. (This is what we will use.) Within screen recording, you have the option to add sound. If you want sound, click the down arrow next to recording, and select internal microphone. Notice you also have the option to emphasize mouse clicks if needed.
When ready, click the red dot to record. QuickTime will start recording. When you are ready to finish the recording, press the black dot that appeared in the top bar of your computer.
That's it! Easy peasy!
awwapp.com is also pretty simple to use. There is the free, basic version and the premium version. The only difference is with the premium, you can save the boards into your account. With the free version you cannot save your boards, but you can export them as a PDF which will have a watermark on it. Since we are just using it for a screencast, we don't need to save or export our board. Here is an example of what the board will look like.
Putting it all together...
Students would have the website open and ready to go. They would then open QuickTime and start recording. Students would go back to awwapp.com (or whatever whiteboard app they are choosing to use) and create their lesson. When they are done, they stop recording. And that's it!
Give kids technology...what could go wrong?
Some students may find it frustrating recording this, because if they mess up, it is on record and they may feel embarrassed, or re-do it a million times until they achieve perfection. When I mess up in class, I over-emphasize my mistake, to hopefully show that it is ok to make mistakes. If they are tech savvy, they may then use iMovie to edit and create a bloopers at the end!
The other issue I for see is if students are working on this during class time. With 20 students in a class, all trying to record their voices, they will most likely end up recording their peers, or be distracted by other students. You need to make sure they are given enough space, such as being able to go into the hall.
And, lastly, there is always that unmotivated student. Even though we read about student tutorials in "Who Owns the Learning", I would liked to have read about how to interact with that student who does not want to do this. There is always one student who isn't even motivated by peer pressure. I am not sure how I would handle that if it did happen (with a missing unit for a review for the final).
Lauren,
ReplyDeleteGreat job! I love the tone of your blog. It is engaging and it sounds like Lauren. You did a very good job showing how you would use this in your classroom. You talked about this in a general sense and a specific sense. I also like that you talked about the possible problems you might encounter. It is nice that your students each have their own device and that most of them have the same screencasting software built into the computer. This will make your life a lot easier. You are the best teacher every!