Assignment 4--Screencasting

I really enjoyed this assignment and creating a screencast has something that I had been wanting to try for a long time. In December of 2009, the community college in which I teach became a part of iTunesU, and podcasting in education has been fascinating to me since. Time is one obstacle I find teachers use as an excuse to prevent them from utilizing podcasting in there courses. By having this as an assignment it forced me to make the time to figure it out. It also forced me to open my headset that the school gave me two semesters ago--terrible I know, but time has a funny way of passing by.

My screencast was on some of the new features present in the Windows 7 operating system. I purposefully chose a topic that I could use in the computer concepts course I teach. Currently people may be using Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7, and I wanted students that may not have access to the newest version to see some of the changes. Since I teach both online and traditional courses it is difficult for the online students to see first hand examples that I wish to show them of certain technology applications. Through screencasting they can not only see what I am doing, but they can hear me as well.

Creating the written notes as part of the screen cast I also enjoyed, because I have had two deaf students during the past school year. It has been my experience that videos do not always have closed captioning capabilities, and I was excited to know how to incorporate this into the cast. I had a few interuptions, and had to start over four times before I was happy with the recording. The phone also rang during one occurance. I did get a little confused when trying to finialize the video in knowing which format to save it in. Through a help tutorial I was able to resolve these issues.

This was one of the first assignments where I have run into several obstacles. Initially I had set out to use ScreenToaster to create my cast. Earlier in the semester I had begun to play around with the site, but had not finalized the project. Several days before the assignment was due Dr. Yuen discovered they were terminating the site. It wasn't terribly difficult to train myself using Screencast-o-matic, and other than those few things it was a great experience. This assignment is something I will definately continue to use in future courses I teach.


My screencast can be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_HWwydos5o