Screencasting: Make Your Own Tutorials!

Screencasting and Education
As seen from the classification above, two of the major uses of screencasting are directly related to education–tutorials and HOW-TOs and instructional movies. Since a screencast is relatively simple to make and does not require significant resource and knowledge, it is not surprising that the Net is full with educational screencasts on most diverse topics–from teaching beginners how to perform basic operations in office packages, to explaining the intricacies of complex technologies. Although screencasting has not yet replaced human teachers, it can be of valuable help for self-learners and in e-learning because it gives the chance to view the movie at leisure at home and play it as many times as necessary to fully understand the concept or to memorize particular steps.

As I said, on the Net there are screencasts about almost any topic and technology one can think of. Among the links to sites with educational screencasts, I can name http://myscreencast.com/forums/ as one place where there are many screencasts divided into categories (concepts/ideas, software development, web stuff, Mac, Windows, Linux software, etc.), plus a section to request a screencast about a particular piece of software. Another site with general resources (although it seems that they are more Mac oriented) is http://www.screencastsonline.com. An excellent place for Excel beginners is http://www.schooldatatutorials.org. A place with more technical screencasts (actually targeted mainly to development with Microsoft products) is http://channel9.msdn.com. The links I quote are just to give you an idea about what is available on the Net and the list of interesting sites with screencasts can be endless. A simple search in Google is likely to lead you to the stuff you want, but if you still cannot find the screencast you are looking for, why don’t you make it yourself?

Tips and Tricks for a Simple Educational Screencast
Well, creating an educational screencast is not that much different from creating any screencast. Maybe one of the most obvious differences is that with educational screencasts (especially when the target audience is not familiar at all with the concept or the product discussed), you have to include all steps in order not to make the user wonder how you managed to reach that screen you are explaining, and you also need to offer more in-depth explanations. Also, if you are a lecturer, it is worth recording your own voice for the narrations, no matter if you love the way it sounds or not, rather than ask somebody else to do it for you, just because you believe that his or her voice or intonation is better than yours. In my opinion, for an educational screencast, the presence of audio narration to explain what’s going onscreen is mandatory.

One of the first issues that you need to consider when preparing your screencasts is what software you will use and what output file formats will be best for you. As far as screencasting software is concerned, there is really a lot to choose from–starting from free packages (although they do not offer all the extras of commercial ones), to lite versions of professional ones, to the professional ones themselves. I am not going to delve into much detail or recommend a particular screencasting program, since your choice largely depends on your purpose and on your budget but here you can read reviews about the most popular screencasting programs.

The other issue that you need to consider before you start recording your screencasts is the output file format. Generally, choices are Shockwave, Flash, standalone executable files (EXE), AVI, QuickTime, and Windows Media Files (WMF). Flash is best if you plan to publish the screencast online, while standalone executable files and movie formats are generlaly fine for Windows and Macintosh, but you should still check in advance to see if the file format of your choice is supported on the operating system that it will be played on. One of the most helpful brief explanations of file formats I have found until now is contained in the documentation of Camtasia Studio, so if you decide to download the trial, you may want to have a look at the “Help Me Choose a File Format” section.

As I said, preparing a simple screencast is easy and to accomplish it, you will not need to reads tons of documentation. With some of the screencasting programs on the market it is really intuitive to record a screencast. But in any case, before you start recording, you need to prepare first. It might be interesting for you to see how screencasts are made. For this purpose, although this is not the typical screencast because it involves off-screen scenes as well, I recommend you to see this one: http://libsyn.com/media/donmc/SCO0015_-_Behind_The_Scenes_-_H264_-_Chapters.mov.

When you have finished with the preparation and planning for what to include in you screencast, it is time to record it. I would like to say right away that it will be a miracle if you manage to do it right the first time–not that I mean that it is so difficult to do it, but as my experience shows, there must be some kind of scenic fever while people record themselves, and as a result, there can be a lot of chaotic actions with the mouse and uncountable “hmmm’s” if the whole activity has not been rehearsed prior to recording it. Therefore, my tip is that you prepare well and don’t rely on improvisation. At the same time, do not get discouraged or frustrated if you need to record a movie clip a couple of times over. Be prepared to record (or at least heavily edit) the audio narration after you have completed the screen activity. You will need to synchronize audio and video so that the screencast will make sense, so in order to produce a screencast of decent quality, this step is mandatory.

When you plan the screencast, there is one more thing to consider: its text. Yes, even if you do not write the text before you start recording, you need to have an idea what you will include and never forget that the text must be suitable for listening to. For example, when one reads a piece of text, long sentences and paragraphs and complex words are not so much of a problem, but when one listens to the same text, it becomes more difficult to comprehend. Summarization and picking out key ideas for the screencast naration is much more effective than long winding and rambling paragraphs.

Another tip is not to make the screencast too long. Instructional movies are fine, but if you explain a simple concept in the course of half an hour and you include every single irrelevant detail you can think of, you might expect that your audience will get extremely bored. First, pick out the most important ideas that the user may find useful. Second, a”trick” to shorten the overall time of a screencast that you must always consider is the speed the narration. It is obvious that when you talk faster it will take less time to narrate the text, but for the user, the tempo of your narration might be too fast to follow. For longer movies (or for movies with distinct separate parts) it is a must to include breakpoints of some kind – places where the user can stop and have a rest and then go on.

For educational screencast, one of the best things to do is to use more callouts and cursors that are easily noticeable on screen. Unfortunately, it is mainly the commercial programs that offer an abundance of these extras. Another extra that is valuable for preparing coursework are quizzes, which allow you to have questions with multiple answers, and then calculate a score. But I dare say that only a few of the commercial programs offer this feature, so at least when you start out working with screencasting, you might have to do without it. In any case, hopefully this guide has given you the springboard you need to dive into the world of screencasting.

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