This Week's Exploration - Screencasting!

As Harada (2010) asserts, it is time to re-image my school library. While I am ready and able to coach teachers and students in using many web 2.0 tools, our school community still sees the library as primarily a repository for books. Despite many newsletter blurbs, staff, students and parents do not use the technology available through our library. With only three afternoons per week in the library, it is difficult to find time to provide instruction for teachers, or individual students for that matter. Creating screencasts with instructions about how to use our online library system, district e-resources, and some web 2.0 tools introduced briefly in class would be invaluable. Jing can record up to five minutes of screen action, annotate with text and arrows and use frames to point out certain features in the image (Berger & Trexler, 2010). Both Richardson (2010) and Berger and Trexler (2010) recommend Jing and the associated Screencast as easy to use and able to create videos that can be embedded into a wiki or blog. A LearnItIn5 video (below) also demonstrates that Jing is simple and effective. Jing and Screencast seem the perfect solution to my professional needs. So, here I go.....



References

Berger, P. & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world. Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited.  

Harada, V.A. (2010). Librarians as learning leaders: Cultivating cultures of inquiry. In S. Coatney (Ed.), The many faces of school library leadership (pp. 13-28). Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 3^rd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin.