February 10-Vidcast

This week we were introduced to vidcast. This is kind of like podcast in that is a technology tool students can access themselves away from school that has audio but now we are adding visual. There are a few different ways this can be used. You can use a program like photostory where you simply use still pictures and add audio recording to them and create a slide show of sorts. Other things like flip video cams can be used to film short movies that can be uploaded as a vidcast. The last tool we learned about briefly was jing. This tool seemed a little confusing to me but may not be so confusing once I actually have time to play around on it but it is basically used for taking screen shots on your computer and sharing them. This tool also makes editing fairly easy.

I think we are learning how to do vidcast because it is a simply tool that could really enhance learning in our classroom. I know so many students that would love to do something hands on like creating a vidcast. I think this technology could actually really help students that may be working on projects outside of class. I could create a quick vidcast to explain an assignment to someone else in a work group. Vidcasts could also be used for presentations in many classes which would be more exciting than just lecturing.

This information will impact my classroom because I think this would be an easy tool to help students learn technology and incorporate many other subject areas. Using vidcast could be a great collaborative assignment for students to work on in teams and would be something fun that they could use to learn another subject. I also think this would be a fun tool for other teachers to learn so that they can create different vidcast they would like to use in lessons. The possibilities for fun projects and class community building opportunities using vidcast is endless. Vidcast really opened my eyes to a fun way to learn in the classroom that will make learning more exciting and interactive. Plus when students are creating things from the learning that has already taken place the concepts are just retained even more which is what we are working towards as teachers.