Lots of Decisions to Make

Lots of Decisions to Make

Photo Credit: vanhuynguyen Flickr via Compfight cc

     I was talking to a friend who knows I am still trying to decide on a platform.  Today she said to me – “just pick one and move forward”.  I think she is right, so I hope to do that in the next couple of days (notice any irony here ? ).

According to Bates, it is important to pay attention to the “unique pedagogical features” of text, audio, and video when creating educational content. He suggests taking time and carefully choosing which is best in a given situation to deliver specific content.  I have not tried making a screencast before to deliver content, so this week I took on the challenge…

I chose Screencast-O-Matic, which is fairly easy to use and it is free (for the basic package). You can watch the following You Tube video if you want to find out more about it:

 

It gives you the choice of 3 different options : screen only, webcam only or both together. I created an example of each option as you can see below:

 

My ‘Screen only’ example:

 

 

My ‘Webcam only’ example:

 

My ‘Screen and Webcam’ example:

I tried a lot of different ways to get these files to play in WordPress.  I ended up creating You Tube videos, (which was a another new process).  I found a good You Tube video to explain how to upload videos from Screencast – O – Matic to You Tube.  You can check out Stephanie Davis’ demonstration here if you are interested in trying it yourself.

I feel pretty darn pleased with myself for accomplishing these feats this week. Come to think of it – I think these might classify as Vlogs (that I have heard others talk about). Yay! (now I sound like my students – making a ‘little deal’ sound like a ‘big deal’ 🙂

I checked out lots of great blogs from my classmates this week and learned many interesting new things.  One thing that really interested me was Ed Puzzle posted by Carla this week, where she explained that you can crop existing videos and then add an audio track or audio notes. She also drew my attention to something called Playposit where you can add text to an exiting video.

There were other things that interested me that I would like to try sometime.  Stephanie and Twana talked about using Adobe Spark, which I would like to check out in the future.  Also, Benita and Roxanne talked about GoAnimate, which intimidates me but intrigues me at the same time.  I am learning lots from my classmates.

If anyone is familiar with Screencast – O – Matic and wants to suggest other ways to transfer screencasts to my wordpress blog – that would be great.