Cast the spell on learning with Screencast-O-Matic!

Have you got bored dealing with the same topic and mode of presentation years after years? Have your students become tired of the power-point mode of oral presentation each semester? Are you thinking of adding variety, diversity, and multimodality to your students’ presentation projects? ‘Yes’ for all the questions? Okay then, this blog post is for you! In today’s post, I will introduce Screencast-O-Matic which offers accessible tools that empower its users in making, remaking, decorating, and publishing their videos.

What is it?

Screencast-O-Matic is a video creating and editing tool using which videos can be created by recording the screen and capturing the video at the same time.

How to incorporate in education?

Screencast-O-Matic is very much compatible with the concepts of blended learning and flipped classrooms. After the unprecedented interruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, in many educational institutions in Bangladesh, online classes have already been established as alternatives to face-to-face classes. In this respect, for delivering class lectures with power-point slides you can use Screencast-O-Matic to create your video by capturing your screen, embedding your webcam appearance (or disappearance! Your choice!), incorporating background sounds, and more! You will be able to save your video and share it with your class. Not only that, in the face-to-face classes as well, you can use screencast videos for pre-class preparations or for giving general feedback to the class. Besides, another way of using it is to capture students’ presentations which would add versatility and enhance creativity. As you all know, delivering a face-to-face power-point presentation is the only presentation mode for the university students in here. Therefore, sometimes it becomes very tedious for the teachers to grade the same sets of presentations in almost every course. Not only that, it can also be demotivating for the students to have the same format of presentation in the available courses. Therefore, if the students use Screencast-O-Matic while creating their video, it would engage them in the task, enhance their motivation and ensure diversity in their completed task.

A sample task

Speaking: Understanding features of oral presentation

This sample activity will be suitable for intermediate-level university students.

Suppose, the students of the ELT module Methods and Principles of English Language Teaching are taking preparation for their semester-terminal oral presentation. Ask them to watch the following video created by using Screencast-O-Matic. You can ask them to reflect upon the following points after they finish watching the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-hOVpc7DvE

• What are the strengths of this presentation?
• What are the weaknesses?
• What is your suggestion for improvement? 

Now, keeping in mind the discussions after watching the video, ask them to prepare a 5-minute Screencast-O-Matic presentation on the strengths and weaknesses of their preferred teaching methods and upload it on the Google Classroom.

Affordances

For students, presentations recorded through this tool is not a ‘once and for all’ performance. They can go back through their presentations and can edit or re-record them before finally publishing them.

As it is asynchronous, teachers can also go back through the videos for checking or cross-checking the content before marking which will ensure reliability in grading.    

Moreover, in screencasts, two modes are blended together: the presenters can record their screen as well as their webcam appearances at the same time. Not only that, they can also add background music or edit videos with Screencast-O-Matic’s newly launched video-editing features. The incorporation of multimodal features in their presentations will motivate the learners to take charge of their L2 learning.

Above all, it would be a ‘less- worrying’ and ‘more enjoying’ experience of oral presentation for the learners.

Pitfalls

With other ICT tools, this tool and its application in the teaching context have some limitations:

Firstly, some of the advanced features like repositioning the webcam interface, editing backgrounds, and incorporating audio/video files will only work in the paid ‘pro’ version.

Secondly, as it would be a recorded presentation, students may just read aloud from their scripts while presenting which may move them away from the genuine purpose behind their presentation.

Lastly, there can be some students who are not comfortable with this mode of presentation. Even, as I know, some students in our context may not have the necessary device(s) for creating their videos.

Dealing with difficulties

Although the free version of screen does not cover some features, for students’ class presentations or the teachers’ lectures, the free version is enough! Regarding the second difficulty, students’ can be briefed about the importance of natural talk in their presentation so that they do not lean on reading aloud from their notes. Lastly, the students who do not have the necessary devices can be asked to use the computer lab to facilitate their presentations.

So, are you now ready to ‘banish the boredom’ of class presentations? Start casting the spells of Screencast-O-Matic!