Manaiakalani Session 7: Devices

 Empowering learning through ScreenCastify

Screencastify is a fantastic tool for empowering learning. Obvious applications can be for presenting lessons and for kids to complete assessments. Lockdowns have provided really great opportunities to build up ScreenCastify videos for rewindable learning that aren't only great during lockdown, but are really powerful tools that are on our content websites for day to day, face to face learning. 

The videos help to 'clone' me as a teacher and supports my teaching method which means kids are all over the place doing different things and following a curriculum at their pace. It also gives us an opportunity for different teachers to explain in different ways meaning better outcomes for our kids. An example of how I do this is below with a discussion of a proposed personalisation of a cybersmart lesson.

 

But it's worth so much more than 'just' that. More recently, I've been experimenting with it to give feedback to kids on their work which makes this important learning tool rewindable.

Additionally, in my role as DP, it's a great tool for staff PLD in terms of short videos on how to do something on KAMAR or for empowering staff with their own digital platform learning. Saves me time in terms of tracking everyone down to have a face to face conversation when it's something really small and relatively insignificant and it's also much quicker than taking screen shots and putting in arrows etc.

But I think also there are some definite things to keep in mind when it comes to using Screencastifies:

• I know as a learner, that I can read faster and control the speed at which I read something. So, often key procedural information is better in a doc that I can quickly scan. 
• Short attention - I know if I see a 4-5 minute video I really weigh up whether I want to spend that 4-5 minutes of my life that I'll never get back (despite inadvertently spending hours watching cat videos on Instagram at night or rewatching the entire series of Downton Abbey). So for my learners, I need to keep videos short to 1-2 minutes with one main focus (eg putting in full stops, then another one on how to use commas, rather than a 15 minute film on all editing of all punctuation) and clearly label them with titles that include Video One: [whatever the focus is]

Some extension ideas for me to try out in the future:

• uploading to You Tube and then adding the videos to Ed Puzzle to make them more interactive - kind of like how I would ask questions of my learners in class to make sure that they had understood my instructions.