As someone who works a lot online I have always been a fan of screen recording. I run a number of moodle sites for both asynchronous learning and for collaborative projects and have found that screen recordings can give these VLEs the ‘personal’ touch participants often find lacking in the online environment. I tend to use Jing, which you can download and use for free though there is a pro account that costs a small fee. I discovered it sometime last year and have been a fan ever since. I have been doing a lot of screen recording this week and it reminded me how much I love using it. I have other recording programs such as Camtasia but as good as they I seem to default to jing whenever I need to record something. It’s especially useful for sharing and embedding as it creates the links for you – you simply need to pass on the link to whoever needs it and they can view the recording.
Typically I utilise screen recording for
- Tutorial videos - providing simple walkthroughs of how a course site works, how to upload and and so on.
- Problem solving – when a participant has a problem – anything from how to do something through to confidence issues, we used to simply email back a reply. Now we can simply record a response and send back the link, adding the visual element I think really bolsters confidence, adds clarity and makes the whole process more personalised for the participant, which leads me to the third use and for me the most the eye opening.
Giving feedback via screen recording. This has been something of a revelation for me. I first came across the idea in a session given by Russell Stannard and was able to give it a go during an exam preparation course that some teachers were doing online for the delta 1 exam. Each module of the course deals with one of the exam questions and culminates in the participant tackling a sample question.
Previously I would have used the comment function on word along with features of moodle to give the participant feedback. There is nothing wrong with this but comments can be misinterpreted or come across unclear to the reader. In a face-to-face course you can sit down with the participant and talk through work. Online you could of course do this via the Internet but often time zones and teaching schedules can make this difficult to achieve. And in any case the screen recording has the advantage of permanency so the participant can go back to listen again at their leisure or when they are ready to review the particular question.
So during this course rather than providing written feedback I used screen recording. I displayed the candidates work on the screen and recorded myself going through the work, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each answer and where relevant displaying a model answer next to it and making comparisons. Not only does it make the whole process clearer for the participant but means you can also really highlight areas of excellence and weakness – I think the fact the participant can hear it adds an emphasis / tone of encouragement that the written word does not always convey. Once I had recorded the assessment of their answer, I simply sent them the link to it.
I also used screen recording to make an overall feedback summary to the whole course especially good for highlighting common errors and weaknesses.
I think over the course I got better and more effective recording the feedback, certainly at the beginning it was more time consuming than typing feedback but then again most things new take some time to get used to.
At the end if course I added a question to feedback to find out if the participants reaction to receiving feedback in this way. The overall response was extremely positive – here are a couple of replies:
“I found the screen-recorded feedback more useful and helpful than written feedback.”
“I think this is a great way of giving feedback and will use this method with my own students”
The last comment shows how this technique is not exclusive to teacher training courses but is something that most students of English will benefit from and indeed I know many teachers in the online community who record their feedback for students. I am extremely keen to add screen recording to all our courses as a way of giving feedback on submitted work. I also want to try out other techniques such using it for task setting and when I next teach some students I hope to be able to try many more of the ideas on that Russell has come up with.
