Blended Screencasts - Record & Flip

Record & Flip

Record it, then flip it, simple!

Screen recording, or Screencasts are one of most most effective teaching tools in the arsenal of a teacher who is fortunate to be work in a 'technology enhanced learning environment' but, if the devices you have to hand are laptops, not tablets, than expecting your students to create a screencast can be more of a hassle than it's worth. 

That is unless you know how to record and flip. 

I've used demonstrated this technique before in a context of asking students to model a skill with apparatus, such as how they can measure an angle with a protractor, but with a little imagination it's not difficult to see how this could be used in other ways:

• Mapping skills in Humanities
• Rationale for a design proposal in Design & Technology
• Description of the significance of imagery in the Visual Arts
• Mind Mapping relationships and connections
• Reflection on ideas and opportunities for development in a flash draft in English
• Reflection/critique of a passage/excerpt in a printed book/magazine
• Annotation of musical notation to indicate understanding of the structure
• Annotation of diagrams, graphs, and charts
• Explaining a strategy or process in solving a Mathematics problem
• and many more...

All the students need is a whiteboard or a sheet of paper, and to position it as shown above. They can tap the spacebar to start and stop the recording. 

Once the recording is finished the student can flip the video horizontally and vertically, then review and trim* the video is necessary before sharing it with the teacher. 

An Example from Mathematics

Here's one I did earlier...**

*If the student has done a great deal of  'umming and ahhing' they can delete the segments of the video that are unimportant, but most of the time this is probably unnecessary as you're not looking for a highly polished artefact here, and hesitation (when and why) may well be useful information in and of itself.

Student Example

** Disclaimer, the hesitation you see in this video was intentional in order to create a sense of authenticity, honest, it's true!