Educreations Screencasts

A screencast is a video of data with accompanying audio. Screencasts are an incredibly powerful tool for gaining insight into a student’s understanding and thinking across the curriculum. Screencasts can be created by students of all ages from Kindergarten to Year 12. They can also be used by teachers to provide instruction to students that can be viewed any time at home or at school. Students can absorb information at their own pace by re-watching sections of the video. Using Dr Reuben Puentedura’s SAMR model screencasts are a good example of redefinition, where technology allows for the creation fo new tasks previously inconceivable.

There are a number of tools that can be used to create screencasts. I find Educreations a particularly effective website and app for Primary School students. The free basic account is useful as a trial, however it is limited by the 50MB of storage space and the capacity to only save one draft at a time. The Pro Classroom account provides 5GB or storage and unlimited drafts. You can set up one teacher with 40+ students. An alternative setup is to create one account with a shared generic email address, for example year2@myschool.nsw.edu.au. All the students log into this account and can therefore see all the screencasts created by their peers.

Screencasts can be used across the curriculum to capture student learning. For example students could explain their solution to a mathematics problem. Or they could annotate an image of an animal lifecycle. Or they could describe a series of photos taken on an excursion. I recently created screencasts with Year 2 students to identify types of language in a picture book. It was a very simple screencast with a single slide that included text and images.

Here are six tips for using Educreations for creating a screencast with students.

1. Name: Student name should be clearly identified on the first slide and also in the title.
2. Practise: Rehearse commentary before recording. A script scaffold can be useful for some students. This is a sample script for the screencast above – The Tram To Bondi Beach.
3. Prepare: Set up all sides first before recording. The first screencast can be just one slide to keep the recording process simple.
4. Recording: Scatter students around the classroom or out in the playground so they have a quiet space. Encourage them to speak loudly and clearly. Pause recording during lesson transitions or when there are distractions that will cause background noise.
5. Editing: If students make a mistake on their recording it can be edited. Tap on the ‘Play’ icon in the top left hand corner. Tap on ‘Edit’ then drag in the yellow bar to trim the audio.
6. Draft: The screencast does not need to be completed in one lesson. Tap on the ‘Back’ arrow in the top left hand corner of the screen and select ‘Save As Draft’.