Chapter 7 & 8 Response


After reading through chapters 7 and 8, I was left feeling rather overwhelmed by all there is out there for transmitting information.  After recording our voice and adding the recording to our PLE, my initial thought was that I wasn't really thrilled with how my recording turned out.  We had some technical difficulties at the end, and I was left feeling dissatisfied with my results.  I considered taking it off and just re-recording it, but then I remember a reference to Audacity in the chapters.  Audacity is a nifty little tool that can edit audio.  I had been introduced to it before, but never had the patience to figure it out.  So I figured this would be a great topic for my screencast.

The screencast proved to be a whole different challenge, even more difficult than figuring out Audacity.  My browser was not cooperating, saying that I needed a Java runtime to use Screencast-o-matic.  After a couple hours trying to troubleshoot the issue, I resorted to using Quicktime which proved to be very easy. We are so fortunate to have so many options out there for the same project.  Unfortunately I had to take multiple takes, but I think what I ended up with works for the purpose of this assignment.

Screencasting is such a great tool and I could see using it to help explain homework on my website for my students or giving parents a guided tour of useful websites on the internet.  The more I  play with these tools in class, the more I can see how they can be used in education.  It's easy to ignore the technology that is out there, but honestly, the more we use it and the more our students use it, the better prepared they will be in the real world.

Anita models screencast chapter response

Click on the the screencast on the left to get an overview of how to create your Screencast Chapter Response for this week.


My Chapter 7&8 Highlights

As I mentioned in class there are a number of tools available on the Web that do similar functions. My experience is that there is usually a common function provided by all, but then each application will have a certain unique feature or attribute. For this course I chose quick, easy access tools to try and demonstrate how simple it can be to start exploring some of these in practice.

Photo Sharing
Tools like Flickr and Google's version Picasa, allow you to upload photos and share them via the Web using a variety of mobile devices. As we already have Google account through Boxer we will explore Picasa which has similar to features to other photo sharing apps. Picasa: https://picasaweb.google.com/home

Podcasting
Simply put, podcasting is a digital audio file in an mp3 format. To create a podcast you need a digital audio recorder, server space to host the file, something to say, and time to prepare it.  You can find a range of tools, some with editing capabilities to create state-of-the-art podcasts. The tool we will be using is podomatic at http://www.podomatic.com/login

Screencasting 
One step up from podcasting, is capturing what you are doing on your computer while adding audio narration. Richardson's example in the chapter provides a good overview http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html

There are many exciting ways to integrate this tool into educational practice and a number of tools to achieve this – e.g. Jing, Camtasia. The tool we will be using, is screencast-o-matic http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/screen_recorder

Resource reviewed http://www.khanacademy.org/



Some other Screencasting Tips

Once you are ready to record your screencast, click on Red button to start session on the screencast tool bar. Click Done when you are finished.

When you are happy with your product Publish to YouTube & follow the prompts [including adding a title, etc] until you come to the Upload to YouTube button.


From here you will be prompted through a few windows to add your YouTube account so that Screen-o-matic can upload your screencast to You Tube.

  

When the screencast has been processed, you will need to go to your You Tube page by clicking on My Channel. On this page you will see the Video Manager button on the top right fo the screen. This will show a list of all of your videos.

 From there you can select the uploaded screencast and use the Edit drop down to get to Info and Settings.

Here you will see the option to select Unlisted - Anyone with the link can view.

Now you are ready to go bring your Screencast into the New Post you created in the class Blog.
Position your cursor, then click on the little black icon in the WYSIWYG toolbar to Insert a Video. You will then be presented with options for selecting a file and can go directly to My YouTube videos.

Hope that helps, and have fun!