Screencast Reflection

Cool Tools Screencast of Google Maps

New Screencast

When it came down to starting my Cool Tools Screencast I picked Google Maps because it was something I was familiar with because I like using it to find proximity of locations I travel to in order to find out what is near it in order to keep from getting lost.  So a lot of my preparatory work was done way in advance of starting my recording.  I spend probably a half an hour playing with all the tools on the website to become familiar with them to avoid issues while recording.  The recording of my screencast probably took me close to two and a half hours.  Between issues with my computer and Jing and my poor timing the Screencast took longer than I expected.  At time when I was recording I would try to pause and resume only to find out a couple times it didn't pause.  That was rather frustrating but I chalk that one up to my five-year-old computer.  Also I really wanted to do a basic overview of the tools, which I scraped that idea since it took me way over the time limit.  So then when I recorded it I used the basic, more classroom resourceful tools.  I originally wanted to show how easy it was to customize directions, but found it irrelevant when I needed to fit my time requirement.
I find that doing a screencast can really aid in teaching your students when you are unable to be there to aid them.  I feel that if I wanted to make a substitute teacher's life simple that they could play a screencast of my taught lesson and supplement to it instead of trying to just construct the lesson from the lesson plans.