PICTURE IT: You are a third grade math teacher in front of your class in the middle of your direct instruction. You have your place value chart displayed on the board and you are explaining place value.
As you point to each place, you say, “This is our ones place. Beside our ones, we have our tens place.”
Student: “Teacher! What is beside the ones place again?”
Then you repeat yourself to make sure student understands what you said because you know that all students learn at different paces, so you don’t expect everyone to get it the first time.
This scenario can last for several minutes, causing the teacher to get off track and also take up extra class time on instruction causing there to be less time for students to actually practice and apply what they have been taught.
To avoid this scenario and similar scenarios, why not create screencasts of your lessons? A screencast is just simply a video recording of your lesson. By creating screencasts of your lessons, you give students the opportunity to learn at their own pace.
You can use a program like Educreations and record lessons directly from your iPad via the app or from your computer via the website. Programs like Educreations allow you to record video and audio presentations on their built-in whiteboard. You also have the capability of importing and annotating photos that can be utilized during your instruction.
Once you have your lessons recorded, you can export the videos and share them with your students with the paid version. If you want to share the videos with your students without paying, as I suspect most of us would prefer, you can share the link to that video with your students to allow them to view on their personal devices. Students can use these recordings while they are practicing the concepts. They would have the luxury of being taught at their own pace. If they don’t understand something, they have the option of rewinding so they can hear and see the parts that they missed again and again until they get it.
Another option is to have students record their own screencasts to demonstrate their learning. These screencasts can be shared with their classmates as a form of peer-tutoring. You can also hold on to it to share with future classes.
So to sum it all up, here are three reasons to use screencasting in your class:
Save yourself time and energy of constantly repeating yourself over and over again
Students can learn at their own individual pace
More class time can be spent on practicing and applying the content
Below is a list of tools that can be used for screencasting with your students:
*Denotes that an iPad app is available.