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SCENARIO 1:
You’ve inspired your students with an amazing demonstration. Direct instruction at its best! It was clear, concise and illuminating. It was exactly what your students needed to gain a deeper understanding of the concept and now they’re ready to apply their new found knowledge. Oh! But what about your students that were absent? Or students who need to experience the lesson again with support, to really get a good grasp? How can your students easily review this lesson later in the year?

SCENARIO 2:
Time for a “Health Day.” You’ve spent hours preparing lesson plans for the guest teacher. It’s a challenge writing plans that both teach the guest teacher and articulate how s/he will teach those concepts. How rigorous are your plans?  Did you introduce new challenges for students to struggle with while providing adequate resources to support them? Or did you come with the review lesson plans that will make it easier for the guest teacher to manage the class?.. and easier to write.

These scenarios are common to the teaching profession. These days it’s super easy to capture and share your lessons. If fact, the most challenging aspect of capturing and sharing your lessons remains thinking them up.  You probably have everything you need to get started. Do you have a laptop or desktop computer with Linux, Mac or Windows operating system? If you have a laptop, chances are it has a built-in mic. If not, you can get a decent mic for under $10. How about a web browser, Chrome, Fire Fox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari? You just need one.

One monumental benefit to screencasting is that you can easily organize your lessons in such a way that students can find just the lesson they need when they need it. If you’ve already established an Internet presence your half way there. The only challenge is that it takes forethought and diligence. It’s not always easy to keep up with creating and posting lessons. But if you do a few each week, you’ll be amazed by work you established in only a month’s time.

Having screencasts of your lessons and demonstrations organized online means that students can access your lessons from nearly anywhere. They can view lessons from home, the library, a corner of your room. They can even view them while your teaching a small group. Imagine, simultaneously teaching three different lessons! The only necessity is that students must have Internet access and a computer. It’s not very hard to find that these days.

This upfront commitment to your students will pay off in the long term. All of your hard work will be rewarded. Students will be able to take advantage of your lessons when they need them. So if they miss school or are expelled, there’s no excuse for not participating in classroom lessons. It’s also a great way to give students more support. Some students just need to be able to hit the pause button in order to digest ideas before going on. They also will have the ability to rewind and repeat.

I mentioned this is useful for students who have missed class. However it’s even more useful when you miss class. With screen casting you can maintain the rigorous standards you have. In fact, you can continue teaching. The Guest Teacher only needs to perform crowd control while you teach the class through projector and speakers. One trick I like to use is making special wallpaper for guest teachers. This way if someone can help them get the computer turned on, then the wallpaper is there to clearly indicate where to start clicking to find out more about the class or to start me up. Here’s an example.

Screencasting takes the focus off from you and put it directly on the learning, where it should be. But be careful. It’s easy to start to over use this technique. It’s also not good for every kind of lesson. Part of the reason you’re a teacher is because you’ve got the charisma needed to inspire students to excel. That’s hard to capture on the computer.

Give it a go! Here are two of my favorite applications, www.jingproject.com and www.screentoaster.com. Both are free and will even store your videos for you. You just need to link to them for your students to find them. By the way, be sure to let your kids take a crack at this too. It’s a wonderful way for them to teach each other. Here’s a teacher’s site full of student work. www.mathtrain.tv

What will you screencast? [Leave a comment below.]

PS. Here’s a screencast example from the above information.

If your students are accessing an Internet site that has pop-ups that theys need to receive, you’ll have to disable the pop-up blocker. An example of such a site is www.calculationnation.com. Netbooks use the Internet browser Firefox on a Linux operating system (ubuntu). Here’s how to enable pop-ups on netbooks.

• Open firefox.
• Click on ‘Edit,’ ‘Preferences,’ Content.’
• Uncheck “Block pop-up Windows.”

Or if you more control over pop-ups see this video.

Digital Storytelling is an exciting way for students to share the creative energy they’ve put into crafting their stories. Here’s an example of a 1st grade student’s work gone digital. Originally her class created a book with paper and crayons to share with their classmates and families. This work was scanned and the author’s voice recorded. Now she has work that can be shared across the United States to where her grandparents live. It can be shared anywhere! Even more important, is the thrill the student experienced at being able to hear her own voice and see her work in this format. Now she’s creating lists of story ideas and writing more stories than is possible to record. This is a great thing. She’s forced to choose her very best work to publish. She’s thinking and acting like a real author because she is one. This story below is what lit the literary fire for her.

For more information on Digital Story telling, be sure to check out these sites.

• Center for Digital Storytelling
• Digital Storytelling Cookbook (.pdf)
• Downtown Aurora Visual Arts (DAVA) 

Disclosure: The author is my delightful daughter.

By the way, the story above was created on a netbook powered by ubuntu. We scanned the images from a scanner using Xsane.  The images were cropped and scaled using GIMP (image editor) . Her voice was recorded and edited using Audacity (audio editor) . Then we pulled everything into Kdenlive (video editor) to create the video file.

If you don’t have Kdenlive installed on your netbook, but would like it, follow the tutorial below that was captured using Screen Toaster. Be warned: The netbooks don’t have the processing power needed to fully edit video. For example when I’ve imported video to cut, splice and render, the preview works in slow motion. This makes it nearly impossible to make fine cuts. So… I would only use Kdenlive on the netbooks to pull in audio and images that are already ordered numerically. This way you can line up the audio and stretch the images to match. Render to .avi or .mp4 (to upload to youtube) and you’re done.

Here’s a great tutorial on from Kevin Riebau on how to permanently tell your computer which application you want it to use when opening certain files.

An issue that keeps coming up - enough to warrant the production of the following 1min video - is that of files not opening in our preferred program. Many times this is due to upgrading software like Microsoft’s Word ‘03 to Word ‘07 and Promethean’s ActivStudio to ActivInspire. For example, the issue is that when you click on a .doc file, it doesn’t automatically open in Word ‘07 (because .docx files do that initially). The idea is that you want to customize what app your files open in - typically the upgraded software or your preferred program. The following movie will show you how to make your files automatically do this all the time and the process can be applied to any kind of files and their associated prgrams (for instance all audio filetypes .mp3, .aiff, .wav with iTunes).

Aurora’s school districts are putting their weight behind netbooks for students with help from the Title I stimulus
By AARON COLE
The Aurora Sentinel
Published: Wednesday, October 7, 2009 3:56 PM MDT
AURORA | Small, cheap, tough and perfect. That’s how local school districts are describing netbooks for educational use.

Netbooks — small notebook computers with a 10-inch screen or smaller — are turning into the preferred method for school districts around Aurora to get more computers in more students’ hands.

Cherry Creek recently purchased more than 250 of the personal computers, bringing their total up to 500 netbook computers this year.

Chief Information Officer Ben Startzer said the district would purchase even more of the low-cost netbooks over the next year, eventually bumping that number up to around 1,000.

“Really we see them as affordable and reliable options,” said Startzer.

Similarly, Aurora Public Schools uses 1,100 of the computers at its schools and plans to purchase 600 more this year, according to Ivan Duran, director of APS technology.

That push started a year ago when the district tested about 100 of the small computers at one of its schools to see if the computers would be effective tools in the classroom, Duran said.

Based on that initial success, Duran and the district purchased more, and he says he plans on hitting the 2,000 to 3,000 mark sometime this year.

The local increase is mirrored nationwide. Industry researcher IDC reported in June that the netbook market is projected to grow 60 percent each year from 2008 to 2013.

A Dell spokeswoman said while sales numbers aren’t made public at the company, sales of the netbooks to school districts have risen significantly since the start of the year. The computermaker currently supplies more than 1,000 districts across the country with the netbooks.

Duran said studying the use at other districts prompted APS to purchase the computers last year.

“We did see them as a lower-cost option for teachers to get this technology in the hands of students and really have a direct impact,” he said.

Netbooks have taken off in recent years mainly because of the small price attached to the computers. Most netbooks fall within a $400 to $500 price range, with several models under the $400 threshold.

Comparatively, laptops average around $800, making the netbook purchases ideal for most within the district.

Although underpowered compared to many notebooks and desktops, netbooks are suited mainly for word processing and light Internet duty.

Duran said APS students use the machines for word processing; however, web-based applications allow for the small books to venture into different applications such as photography and video applications. Many of the netbooks are equipped with built-in cameras for students to videoconference.

Netbooks at APS run on Linux Ubuntu, which is a free, open-source operating system distributed on the Internet. That helps keep costs down, Duran said, and the district mainly uses web applications that are freely distributed and require no licensing fees.

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