“Jing”-le Bells (Mini Screencasts)

Today, I started work on a series of mini-screencasts to teach my students to use Edmodo, WordPress, and generic word processing/spreadsheet concepts.

I’ve already determined this MacBook internal mic isn’t going to cut it for bulk production-

I sound like I’m recording

in an airplane…. that’s in the air…. sitting in the back by the engines…. Anyhow, it’s ok for now. I find it take

s me 3-4 cuts to get the screencast down to the ‘under a minute’ goal.  I start out thinking I’m being concise, say extraneous things, then forget an important step.  It’s rather like my teaching right now- each of the three rounds in each grade level gets something a little more refined and streamlined.  ((Last week, we created cards for teachers for all 18 classes…. I had my talk down pat by the end of the week, and was entirely sick of it too!))  My students only have 30 minutes with me, a third of which is generally used entering, logging-in, waiting for the server, and exiting.  These must stay short.  I am using Jing, and embedding them into posts in Edmodo.  Then, I’m giving them a shared tag so they appear in the students Tags sidebar.

Here are a few examples: