Incorporate Screencasting into your lesson plans

Introduction – Jing and Screenr

A few months ago I decided to use screencasting more in lessons. The first programme I tried was Jing. I actually liked it so much that I took out the pro membership which was very cheap but gave more benefits. Then I discovered Screenr which seems to have all the benefits of Jing pro as well, although it is free.   I wanted my class to do two things:*Learn how to create a Voki (a little avatar that can speak) .*Get their Vokis to complain about an issue in society as a writing and speaking task.

How to make a Voki

For this part of the lesson I explained how to make the Voki using http://www.voki.com/. The students really enjoyed this lesson. I also made a screencast using Jing on 'How to make a Voki so that the less confident students could practise and finish at home.

How to use Jing

I discovered an amazing site for learning how to use Jing.  Here is an image of it plus the hyperlink.



http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/jingInReality/index.html

Give a talk on an issue

*I wanted the class to use their Vokis to express an opinion about an issue.
*I captured an example for them to use using Screenr.

The Task
Today you will make a Voki expressing some strong opinions. Use http://www.voki.com/ to do this.

1. Think of something that really irritates you, that you think something should be done about.
2. Here are some sentence starters you could use:

*What really gets on my nerves is … the reason for this is
*What drives me up the wall is … because
*What I can’t stand is … . I think
*What really annoys me is … You see

3. I got this idea and took a Voki screencast  from Ian James's fantastic blog that I follow (http://tefltecher.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/voki-grumps/)

 

A blogpost about using Screenr

I have written a blog post about how to use Screenr:
http://schoolnetsa.blogspot.com/2011/10/screencasting-with-screenr-is-so-easy.html



Provide access to your Screencasts to the students

What I did is I created a blog especially for Screencasting so that the students could just go to the link and open up the screencasts.  However both Jing and Screenr store your screencasts so you can keep them there with links. Alternatively you can download them to your computer as MP4 files.



Recently I provided this lesson on a PowerPoint at a TeachMeet but the screencasts wouldn’t open for some reason.  I hope that doesn’t happen here!

Further ideas

I think that in the iintegration of your curriculum with technology this would be a great way to help the students that might falter a bit and want to practise at home. If you have a large class the students could go over the instructions using your short screencasts (screencasts should always be short and to the point - no longer than three minutes, for example.)

Why not give screencasting a try?