Reflection to Microsoft Office Screencast assignment

The creation of these screencast was definitely a good experience for me. I enjoyed working with my group as we shared what we knew about Microsoft Word and explored our creativity as we tried to find they best way to present our knowledge. Secondly, I enjoyed the project because I never thought that I could create a computer tutorial like that, and I was impressed by the overall quality of our end product. I was pleased wit the reviews we got from our classmates as they filled out our screencast survey. On a scale of 1-5 for our questions about clarity and usefulness of our screencast got almost all fours and fives, which pleases me because we did work hard address these two goals. We did however receive some comments about our clarity. Our classmates suggested that we should have used a script next time to ensure that we are speaking as clearly as possible and, they also recommended that a script might help our narrator slow down enough to ensure that our viewers can follow along. We also got a lot of comments focused on the footnoting section of our advanced tutorial. Many classmates felt that we needed to start at the very beginning in order to effectively show exactly how footnotes were used. They liked what we told them, but they thought we assumed too much of them. We also received similar advice about our hyperlinking section.

I certainly liked the other groups presentations. I found them personally useful and very professional. I think I will definitely be using screencast in my classroom whenever i get a chance to implement them. However, I don't think I would use the screencasts that we produced in class because I would want to create my own and structure them around my own personal needs, but with that being said I will probably steal some of the ideas that were used in these screencasts.

I think every student could benefit from teacher created screencasts. They can be used to introduce elementary school children to some common and useful features of desktop computers or they could be used in high school to introduce students to their classroom blog. They could even be used at the university level in sophisticated research labs that need to train lab assistant in uniquely complicated software.

In closing, I would love to incorporate screencast in my curriculum. I think its a nice way to express your creativity and perhaps humor to your students and the information they contain can be very helpful. I might even go as to as to have my students create screencast. Perhaps after they have learned how to search scientific journal databases they can create a screncast they future students will want to watch. I think this would be a great way to make to students feel involved in the class and the school community.