Screencasting

At this moment I am so frustrated with Camtasia. After trying multiple times for three days to download the thirty day trail offer I have given up, but when I do get the (expletive deleted) downloaded I can see multiple uses. From Udell’s article I can see diagramming plays for our flag football team in the fall and going over different situations in softball in the spring. This would be a new and attention grabbing way to go over different strategies. Our players could use this to broadcast the results of our games. The school would have a news show of our programs and the students would be learning a cool way to use the web.

An idea for a student based project with screencasting is to create a virtual timeline of the Civil Rights Era. Each student would have an event or person (Selma, Montgomery, Martin L King, President Obama, etc.) to create a screencast about. I would make the first screencast (assuming I can get the expletive deleted downloaded) about the coming of slaves to Jamestown in 1619. This would give me a chance to practice making a screencast and give the students something to model theirs after. I always require sources from more than just the web for our projects. This project would not be “window dressing” as the students would be teaching each other about an era of American History that would involve core values, such as equality, research skills, tech skills, and also cover benchmarks of the MME. This is an assignment that will be fun for the students! Also, Google Maps would be a natural with this project.

Now, I am going back to trying to download Camtasia. Did anyone else have a problem? We use Hughes Satellite, maybe that is part of my difficulty.