Screencasting Made Easy With CamStudio

Being able to create a screencast has become so much more important since the flipped classroom concept has taken education by storm in recent years. The basic premise behind the flipped classroom is for students to learn new information via screencast at home while completing assignments at school where teacher assistance is readily available. To make the flipped classroom concept work, it is necessary to create screencasts or digital video recordings of the required lessons. In most cases, instructors need to record the content and associated images directly from their computer screen. Screencasts also often include audio that provide a verbal explanation of the material.

An excellent screencasting program is CamStudio. CamStudio is a free open source screencasting program that allows users to record all screen and audio activity on the computer. The AVI video files along with the built-in SWF Producer creates a high quality screencast which can be easily streamed to various sources such as YouTube.

One feature I really like about CamStudio is the ability to record and sync audio information with previously recorded video.  This feature is particularly helpful to new users as it can be difficult to coordinate verbal instructions simultaneously with visual images while recording.

How to Get Started:

The link below provides excellent tutorials on many of the features CamStudio offers:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A57A11C0D77BBF9B


Sample Classroom Activities:

1. Students can create a screencast on any topic. Some ideas include:

          a. Grammar lessons such as Parts of Speech or
              Sentence Errors

          b. Biography on a historical figure, famous athlete,
               notable scientist or writer

          c. Current Event

2. Teachers can created lessons like the one below:

CamStudio is an easy to use screencasting tool that creates high quality videos. Check it out here!

This post originally appeared on "The De-tech-tive 4 Teachers"


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