Welcome Week needs screencasts. Cindy Becker

I’ve been a bit worried recently about Welcome Week, and particularly the module fair. How, I have been thinking, are supposed to let our students know all about our fantastic modules if we can do little more than hand out some outlines and answer questions. Then the solution came to me. We could screencast! With some trepidation, I emailed all convenors of Part One modules in English Literature, asking if they would be prepared to come along to a meeting to talk about it and, despite some trepidation, everyone agreed to think about joining me in the project.

Emma and I then had a chat. Would it be reasonable to ask colleagues who have never used presentation software to use Prezi? Indeed, is Prezi the right vehicle for this? Maybe I should just ask colleagues to send me snippets of text and then I could insert them into a Prezi template? But then would that be leaving them out of the fun of the process? We both thought that having just our voices on every screencast we produce might get a bit boring for our students, so we came to the conclusion that we should probably offer to produce a Prezi and turn it into a screencast, if colleagues would agree to do the voicing over.

Then two things happened today to make me smile. The first was an email I received from a colleague who admits to being a technophobe, yet there within the email was a link to a perfect Prezi she had made over the weekend to show off the Part One module she convenes. Within minutes of looking at it I received an email from Emma to share with me her module description screencast, which uses amazing animation software which I really, really want to learn to use.

It’s amazing how screencasting can brighten up your day…

techno smiley copyright free

Watch this space later in the year – Emma and I will be debating the relative merits of differing approaches to module description screencasts – by then we will have tried out several tactics and will be able to support any colleague who is interested in doing the same.

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