Screencaster's Challenge
A New Visions developed challenge allowing teachers to get familiar with the use of Prezi, screencasting tools, and digital tablet pen, all essentials for producing engaging YouPD hacks, student-facing digital tutorials or hooks for student inquiry, or for allowing you to model a rich, multi-modal knowledge product that your students can produce themselves!
Challenge Facilitators
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Challenge Sponsor
Overview
A New Visions developed challenge allowing teachers to get familiar with the use of Prezi, screencasting tools, and digital tablet pen, all essentials for producing engaging YouPD hacks, student-facing digital tutorials or hooks for student inquiry, or for allowing you to model a rich, multi-modal knowledge product that your students can produce themselves!
Preview Action Steps
By the end of this challenge, you should have a working familiarity with the following cool digital content creation tools so that you can produce your own 5-10 minute screencast!
- Prezi
- Camtasia for Mac and/or Camtasia Studio (PC version)
- Wacom Bamboo Pen (optional)
Create yourself a free educator's account at Prezi.com and verify your account at the email address you used. You will need to use an institutional email address to apply. Follow the introductory tutorial below and produce a draft Prezi that tries out some of the following features:
1) Varied text size, style, and orientation
2) Embedded photos and video
3) Shapes, pointers, etc.
4) The use of frames, both visible and invisible
5) A motion path that zooms and pans on objects and frames
Share a link to what you made in the discussion thread below!
A screencast is a video of part of all of your computer screen, often with audio voiceover, that can be a powerful part of any teacher's toolkit. The cadillac of screencasting applications is Camtasia Studio (PC Only) and Camtasia for Mac (fewer features and lower pricepoint than PC version).
- PC Users: Download and install Camtasia Studio (30 day free trial) and watch this introductory tutorial.
- Mac Users: Download and install Camtasia for Mac (30 day free trial) and watch this introductory tutorial.
Try it! Use your Prezi from the earlier step or take an existing Powerpoint or Google Presentation and record your first screencast.
Hints: If you are using video in your screencast, you will need to record system audio. If you are using Prezi, you will want to display in full screen mode after you have started recording. If possible use a headset with a microphone, as the internal mic on your computer is likely not going to give the best quality.
The tutorials below were selected from the TechSmith website, where there are plenty more if you want to go deeper!
PC users:
- Learn about editing dimensions
- Get an overview of the editing area.
- Learn about zooming and panning with smartfocus
- Learn how to cut and split unwanted video and audio
- Add title clips
- Add transitions
Mac users:
- Get an overview of the editing interface.
- Learn about how to use the media bin.
- Get the basics on how to use the canvas
- Learn how to use the timeline
- Learn the basics of effects
- Learn the basics of audio
Go ahead and edit your screencast as you watch these. Make sure to try each feature on your own before moving on the next one!
PC Users: Skip this step (check yourself off) and skip to the next one!
Mac Users: Click the link below, self-assess your understanding, and review the tutorials from the last step where needed.
Mac Users: Skip this step (check yourself off)
PC Users: Click the link below to see if you have tried everything to demonstrate basic understanding of Camtasia Studio!
If you want to have the power to provide hand-written text or drawings, or to add real-time diagramming to your screencasts, we highly recommend adding a USB pen tablet to your toolkit. The most streamlined and widely adopted is the Wacom Bamboo Pen, which costs about 70$ and is both Mac and PC compatible. If you work in the New York City school system, a very competitively-priced DOE vendor that sells the Bamboo Pen is B+H. Here's a link to the product, which should also be available in FAMIS (DOE's notorious purchasing system).
This step is optional, depending upon whether you can get yourself a pen tablet. If you would like to complete this step, watch the following videos:
- The Nitty Gritty of Khan Style screencasting
- Airline Stewardess Explains the Functioning of a Wacom Pen Tablet
Choose a drawing program to use for your practice, or use one of your own!
- Download Smoothdraw 3 (Free, PC-Only) or use MS Paint
- Download Paintbrush (Free, Mac Only)
- Play around with your stylus.
- Try drawing a diagram and writing text
- Try pasting typeset text into the drawing program and writing over it
- If you have Word 2007 or higher (PC Only) try using the Ink Layer in Word and the Math Input Panel from the Accessories section of your start menu.
- Use Camtasia to try making a short screencast in which you narrate an idea that is explained using visuals produced by the stylus...
The final step in screencasting is to select a medium for hosting your video and to "produce" the project with the file format and dimensions that works for your needs. Learn how!
- PC Users: Watch the "Produce and Share" tutorial and the "Embed Video on Webpage" tutorial.
- Mac users: Watch the "Sharing Basics" tutorial and the "Export a Video for a Webpage or Blog."
Note that that the MP4 file produced by Camtasia is usually plenty sufficient for most video platforms or LMS's. Unless you host your own flat-file HTML website or your LMS doesn't have a video upload widget, you won't need all the other files produced in the process.
Good to know: Google Docs can now host video and make it embeddable to any website. If you use Google Sites, the "Insert->Video->Google Docs Video" to use your uploaded videos. Note that you will need your school to unblock http://video.google.com for the content to be available.
Also good to know: In Desire2Learn (NYCDOE's LMS), uploading a video is simple! In the content editing area, use the "Insert Stuff" (
) button to upload your MP4 file directly or add an embed code from a 3rd party host like Screencast.com.
Bonus: If you want your videos to be playable on an iPhone, iPod, and iPad, here are some additional tutorials for PC users:
You'll need to set aside about 40 minutes of viewing time for this step. Below are compelling presentations of two very different pedagogical models in which each proponent attempts to illustrate the effective use of video within an instructional system or learning framework:
- Sal Khan describes "Flipped Instruction"
- Dan Meyers counters Khan somewhat, promoting video and other technologies to help spur "perplexity" (skip to around 6:30 if you're short on time, though I highly recommend watching the whole shabang....in addition to a great critique, he offers some great tool recommendations toward the end)
- Here's a Dan Meyer video designed for students to illustrate how video plays into the pedagogical technique he describes. His blog also gives very articulate voice to these ideas.
Join the discussion around the merits of each of these views, and share thoughts and dredge up additional online resources that others might find helpful when considering how to powerfully impact learning with video...
The YouPD "hack" is an educators' take on the fun meaning of the word originally coined at MIT to describe creative if sometimes ugly solutions to engineering problems, shifted for the classroom to describe what we believe all good teachers constantly do: strive to innovate amidst imperfect and ever-changing conditions, live feedback, and accumulated wisdom about student learning.
Whether you're planning a course, designing an activity, integrating a new tech tool or resource, re-arranging your room, or constructing a whole new instructional system, think about the nuggets of technique or thinking that are focused responses to problems of practice you've faced in your teaching.
A good hack should define it's problem clearly and be organized around presenting a solution. In some cases, defining the problem of practice is straightforward. In others, it might take a bit of working and re-working, because the problem is very broad, like the problem of teaching a specific content area, in which your solution might be a unit or series of lessons or activities in a way that you believe is likely to be effective. Often, planning for next year is framed around what didn't work last year, which might provide great inspiration for your problem statement.
If you have followed this challenge, you should now have some great techniques in your bag of tricks to make the "hack authoring experience" a fun one that also builds your competency in a powerful additional tool to use in your classroom teaching.
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