For as long as I have been a ICT tecaher, I have been looking experimenting with screencasting. It started with creating screencasts to support learning and this task left a lasting impression. Screencasts are very simple in practice, but actually require significant planning, preparation and most importantly understanding of what you are ‘doing.’ or casting! If you are using audio aswell, you almost have to be able to automate the skills / knowledge to be able to effectively narrate the screen cast. I have 18 screencasting tools, all for one reason or another have not been adopted in school. Thats is not to say they are not very good, some were excellent, but a school network often presented barriers; students needed to be able sign in, an applet did play nicely with current IE version, the download format render excessively large files, the UI was just too….. well not as good as most of the others. We all have standards you know.
Screentoaster – was / is great webware but when a class used it blocked the users. As a single users, it was great.
Jing – brilliant – but it we could not get it working on the network. Techsmith could not tells us when a client would be available.
Camstudio – did play nicely on the network.
Wink – just took too long – we dont want to teach screencasting, just gather evidence in a fun way. Death by print screen, no thanks.
Onenote 2007 and the in built screen clip was a huge step in the right direction but it wasn’t screencasting and all the deep thinking, therefore deep learning that it facilitated.
Community Clips came across my radar and for one reason or another, moved out. I can not be 100% sure, but I think it had some to do with the fact that recordings were stored on soapbox, Microsofts Community Clips site and our OCR Moderator was concerned with didn’t have a hard copy (digital copy) ourselves? Well I am pleased to say its back in focus, the Community Clips project has ended but the screen recorder is available for download on http://www.officelabs.com/communityclips. Screencasting may will be back on the agenda and a tick in the box for Microsoft.