What is Screencasting?
Screencasting allows you to record activities on a computer while you talk about what you are doing. To be more official, here is the Wikipedia definition:
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture or a screen recording, often containing audio narration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
Why Screencast?
Personally, I love a good “how -to” screencast. It’s the next best thing to calling on a teacher or waiting for someone in the IT department to help you retrieve a lost file. I myself have had many experiences where I didn’t know how to do something on my computer which led me to a google search on “how-to______________” (insert task here). Reading through step-by-step directions while trying to follow along, clicking back and forth between my actual task and the in-text directions in another window was irritating and time-consuming. Enter the wonderful world of screencasting!
Screencasts can help you do many things from making pivot tables in excel to restoring a previous version of a word doc or creating WordPress multimedia posts. And kudos to the individuals who have created these screencasts because their passion, for what I would consider, totally boring tasks (seriously, excel pivot tables spark no joy) has helped me keep a project moving along. As a future educator who may need to prepare more for online teaching, I can see how creating screencasts can be helpful to support student learning. On that note, I had to learn how to make one. I followed the instructions from my teacher and created my very first screencast. Enjoy!
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