Taking Your Screencasts to a New Level - Paul Tannahill

Paul considered picking apart many other presentations and worried that it would be a presentation of a friend or of someone in the audience. Rather, he showed his own screencast for us to pick apart. Driving Question: What are all the good things about doing screencasts?

Many screencasters use PowerPoint. Many people make a screencast and say, "Now make your's just like mine." Several people talked at length about the tools they used, rather than the actual making of the screencast. Let's define screencasts for the purpose of this discussion: A software tutorial program, rather than a recorded lecture of a keynote or powerpoint. Specifically, a recording to answer a question that is asked over and over and over.

Already I am seeing the need to continue my quest to acquire Captivate by Adobe.

You need to have the following three things for a good screencast:

1. Technical Excellence

Video

1. interface simplicity & clarity
2. effective transitions
3. zooms and pans

Audio

1. vocal clarity
2. vocal inflection - dubbing in your audio creates problems here
3. volume
4. computer sounds - keyboard? clicks?

Deployment

1. Embed using YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, TeacherTube
2. Not a link to a native file

2. Sound Pedagogy

Analyze

1. Needs assessment
2. What do students/clients need to know?

Design

1. Plan your screencast
2. Storyboard
3. Script

Chunk

1. Don't put too much in
2. Don't include distractions
3. Don't underestimate

3. Watchability/Readability

Implementation

1. Title it correctly
2. Tag (taxonomy)
3. Share via every social media you have
4. Ask others to share and comment

Evaluation

1. Invite comments and suggestions
2. Use a hit counter. How many times was it watched?
3. Suggestions?