Our task in this next round is to create a three-minute screencast showing novices how to do something. Our goals are:
- To learn how to do video-based teaching, which is different from teaching live or making written materials.
- To explore the differences between teaching nouns (facts) and verbs (procedures).
- To get more practice giving feedback.
To start, pick a topic that you can teach in three minutes or less. (And three minutes really does mean 180 seconds here.) It can be the topic you’ve been using so far, or something new, or even something that someone else has used, but it must be a process, like setting a breakpoint in a debugger or creating and installing SSH keys, rather than a fact like the way floating-point numbers are stored or the syntax of if/else statements.
Second, you’ll need some software. If you’re using Windows or Mac OS X, download a trial version of Camtasia; it’ll take you about an hour to install it and learn how to drive it. Tooling is a bit more complex on Linux: people have had good luck with Screencast-o-matic, but there’s some buzz now about SimpleScreenRecorder and Freeseer as well.
Third, do a couple of practice runs, but no more than a couple—in the past, some people have spent several hours trying to make their video perfect, but that’s not what we’re after:
- We want to see and hear what you’d actually do and say in front of an audience if you were teaching live.
- In real life, you’ll never have four hours to make a three-minute video anyway (not unless you have a Hollywood-level budget).
Once you’ve recorded your video, post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other sharing site, and then blog a short description of what you’ve taught and a link to the video in the category “Round 6.3″. Please try to get this up by Friday, September 20, so that everyone has a few days to watch and comment on at least two videos.
Finally, please read Chapter 6 of How Learning Works. It discusses the way students’ social, emotional, and intellectual setting influences their learning; part of our discussion on September 26 will be about the ways recorded video helps or hurts this.
As always, please send comments or questions to the mailing list, or directly to me, and we’ll get answers as quickly as we can. And please, whatever you do, don’t watch the film The Last Airbender. The animated TV series is a lot of fun—I’m watching it with my daughter, and we’re both enjoying it—but the movie deserves its 6% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.