My first, but not last, attempt at screencasting

So, here is a link to my first ever (and hopefully worst!) screencast:
643 Screencast


I must say, I will probably never have a career as a narrator. And probably not as a director-maybe assistant director, or maybe I just need to direct someone other than myself. I will say, I have gained a new empathy for all the really lousy YouTube videos we watched in class. This is not to say I didn't like the assignment. I did, and I think it is a terrific assignment. It was just kind of stressful for me. Why, you ask? (Or maybe you don't ask, and are hoping not to find out. Sorry) Well, for just a few reasons.

For example, topic selection. This probably should have been very easy, but everything I thought of seemed so redundant or self-explanatory. I didn't actually look, but I imagine there are about a thousand tutorials on photo editing, or blogging, or wiki-ing (I know, not a word). I really wanted to do something that wasn't adding to the already abundant collection. And then, everything I thought of seemed so obvious, including the topic I finally chose, which was checking out audio and digital books online. Who is actually going to be doing that? Most likely people who already know how to navigate a computer. I ended up banking on the fact that somewhere out there is someone whose children bought them a kindle or mp3 player for their birthday and they have no idea what to do with it. I also convinced myself not to worry about what tutorials already existed. I did discover that there are a lot of cool tools out there though (including one called crocodoc, which has been a lifesaver this weekend! Yay for unforeseen perks of homework).

I also discovered some screencasting problems that we didn't mention in class. For example, I found I have a tendency to play around with the mouse, which doesn't go over well in a screencast. And I had to remind myself to balance professional and natural, and to hit my key points (it's hard to read a script when you have to watch a screen, after all). I also realized that not all topics lend themselves to all teaching strategies - for example, it was hard to draw connections and demonstrate transferability with my topic, and the limited timing didn't help. The big lesson here was that a five-minute screencast takes much longer than 5 minutes to prepare. (Although you may not believe it from watching my screencast...but I really did spend more than 5 minutes on it).

But, on the bright side, we learn from mistakes as much as we do from success, and I definitely learned a lot. I have a great new tool at my disposal, and a nice long list of what-not-to-do's. As far as learning and getting experience goes, this is a definite winner.