Screencast-o-matic

Since starting to teach LINC online, I have been introduced to a wonderful tool -- Screencast-o-matic. This amazing bit of technology is free, easy to use - and it does not require you to create an account. These are a few of my favourite things.

You begin by clicking the blue button "Start recording for free".

Next, you click the orange button "Launch free recorder" and wait for the recorder, consisting of a frame of dotted lines and a control panel, to appear.

You can move the frame around and resize it to capture the part of your screen you want to include in your screencast.

Once you have this in place, you just click the little red Record button, wait for the countdown, and begin speaking.

This handy tool is useful for making How-to videos for students. They can watch the video as many times as they want, pausing, rewinding, or fast forwarding if needed.

I have used this in combination with PowerPoint to create How-to videos for using VoiceThread, performing various operations in Google Drive, and for giving instructions on writing a paragraph.

It can also be used to show students how to use a website -- for example, how to create a student account on the ESL Library site.

With students who are quite tech-savvy, you could even assign a task of making their own screencast. My own students are not there yet, but maybe someday this will be a possibility for them

There is an optional upgrade, which some of my colleagues subscribe to. It is not expensive and allows you to make longer videos, as well as edit videos. In the free version, if you make a mistake, you need to start over, but if you have the paid version, you can edit your creations. So far I have not felt the need for the paid version, but perhaps in the future I will consider it.

If you haven't tried Screencast-o-matic, I recommend you visit the site and start creating.

the perils of Moodle

Since starting full-time online instruction back in mid-March, I have developed a love-hate relationship with our institution's LMS, Moodle.

I love it because it is quite easy to use and flexible. I can easily make quizzes, embed documents, slides, and audio and video files, create a discussion forum... 

Oh, so very quickly I have come to the hate part of the relationship. 

Discussion Forum. Early on, I stumbled onto one of the pitfalls of this LMS. I made the mistake of creating a link for the term Discussion Forum. As in "Write your answer in the Discussion Forum."  Never do this! 

Why? you ask. Well, thanks to Moodle's auto-link feature, once you have created this link, you are forever doomed to have it appear every time you type the words "discussion forum".  You can highlight it and click on the "break link" icon, to no avail. The link stubbornly remains. 

The fix is quite easy, I discovered. Simply type an extra space between the two words. Voila! The link is gone.

Ah, but what about the other link I inadvertently created? Speaking. Yes, in my innocence, I created an eternal link using this one word. Now every time I type the word speaking, a link appears. A little careful thought and a fair bit of extra work solved this one. I now hit the space bar between two letters in this word, highlight the space, and then choose the extra-extra-small font size for that space. Like this: speak ing.  Fortunately, the smallest font size on Moodle is smaller than that of Blogger, so the space is quite a bit smaller. It is not perfect, but it is tolerable. However, the really bad part of this is that every time a student types the word speaking -- guess what? You got it, a link appears. 

And speaking of students, there is another thing about Moodle that raises my hackles. Our institution requires us to put all Moodle activities into books. This results in a nice clean look on the students' Moodle page -- no long string of activities to scroll through. Instead they click on a book chapter, click on a link to an activity (which is hidden but available) and complete the activity. At first glance, this is assuredly a good thing.

We are also encouraged to add a progress bar to the Moodle page. I set up a weekly bar, consisting of blocks that change colour when a student finishes a task. This works perfectly for quizzes -- as soon as the quiz is graded, the block changes form blue to green. But -- for other tasks that are not graded in this way, it is another story. When we set up the progress bar, we can choose one of two completion options: students can manually mark that they have finished OR students must view the activity to complete it.

Great, I thought. Students can manually mark sounds good. "Must view" is worthless, in my opinion, because as soon as they click and open the activity, the block changes colour. They don't need to read or do anything with the activity. Well, turns out "manually mark" is also worthless because it is not available when the hidden-but-available activity is accessed from a book. I asked our resident Moodle expert about this, thinking surely I was missing something, but no; she confirmed that such is the case.

The result is that the progress bar will show completion of anything that is graded, but students will have to use another checklist for other tasks. Again, far from satisfactory, but tolerable. It just seems like in the 21st century, we should be able to do better than tolerable.