Things I was missing out on Part 2: screencasts

As I was reading over some testimonials for the screencapture tool Jing, I started to buy into the idea of using screencasts, not only to enrich and support classroom experiences, but to deliver lecture- type instruction.

By now, many of us have experienced what its like to teach the same thing several times a day, and the potential gamble that ensues when we could be less prepared at the beginning of the day, or tired later in the school day.  Why not create a screencast with microphone recording of exactly what we want kids to see and hear?  For math we could show exactly how a problem is worked... in science we could script a lecture and screen capture examples of the content from the web.

I'm not suggesting to completely replace significant interaction time, but these screen casts could be very useful in various ways:  first of all, you could record them well in advance when you are planning the unit of instruction.  Additionally, you could post them to a class website if you have one and therefore give students enriched content exposure or another assignment or extra credit.

Here is the website for the Jing software: http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html