Having been teaching blended and online courses for a couple of years now, I’m embarrassed to admit that until recently I hadn’t done a screencast. It was my understanding that this would entail the use of an application or service that was expensive (or at best had a limited-use “trial” option). So I finally decided to have a look at what was on offer. Of course a quick search turned up all sorts of lists of “best screencast apps” and “best free screencast alternatives” and so on. But in one video I happened upon a technique that hadn’t occurred to me: using QuickTime. And now that I have discovered the ease with which one can do a screencast this way, I expect this to become a tool I use a lot more.

My first attempt is a quick intro to navigating on Blackboard, intended for students to view at the beginning of the semester. It would be followed by a couple of additional screencasts on topics like completing submissions, accessing feedback, and so on. I should say that I don’t think I would actually use this for my classes. It was a test (took me about 5 tries to get it this “polished”), but I think I’d want to do one or two more to get it the way I’d like it. But it was a good experience, and now I feel fairly competent in doing screencasts with QT.

My second outing was to create this screencast on plagiarism for English composition students. I think it’s a little more successful (I managed to reduce my tendency to say “um” and “er”). I made this as a QuickTime screencast after trying to do it as a PowerPoint recording; for some reason the microphone didn’t work well with PPT. Between writing the content, making the PPT, experimenting with recording on PPT and finally making the screencast via QuickTime (after a couple false starts), I would say this took altogether too much time… but now it’s there. It’s longer than I would like; my next step would be to get it down to maybe 4 minutes, or maybe divide it into 2 shorter videos, given what we know about students’ ability to focus. (Actually, I think given that, I should maybe just figure out how to put it into a meme.)