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Principles for creating effective screencasts

Published on January 30, 2020   9 min

A selection of talks on Technology & Operations

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0:00
My name is Dr. Frances Boylan and I'm the Head of eLearning Support & Development at the Technological University Dublin, Ireland. This talk focuses on how to create effective screencasts.
0:16
So, what is a screencast? Well, a screencast is a recording of your computer screen, the screen on your phone, or on your tablet, which more often than not, is accompanied by audio narration. So, when a viewer is watching one of your screencasts, they're watching a video that you made yourself of what's happening on your computer screen at any particular point in time and listening to you speak over those images of what they are watching. It's basically another type of instructional video.
0:42
Screencasts can be used for so many things. For example, they're perfect for showing your students how to log into your online course, and how to navigate the different tools they'll need that semester. This can then be sent to your students as part of the course induction and a copy can be uploaded to the course itself for easy reference during the semester as they encounter different tools, assignments, and tasks. Screencasts are also very handy for creating a quick tutorial for your students on how to use a specific functionality within a particular software package. I've also seen screencasts used to give students feedback on assignments. In this case, the tutor scrolled through the students' submissions, and as they were highlighting specific texts, they gave feedback relevant to those few lines. This type of feedback can be a lot richer and more student-friendly than a long page of typed feedback or a series of scribbles and margins of a printed document. This leads to less misinterpretation of your feedback as students are also picking up clues from the intonation and the pitch of your voice. Furthermore, using screencasts this way could speed up the feedback giving process considerably for you too.
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Principles for creating effective screencasts

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