Well, this has been an interesting experience. I’m a little late getting to this module due to some health issues, and when I finally did I discovered that my old Logitech Mic/Headphones won’t work with my new Windows 10 computer. I had to quickly get a new set through Amazon. (I love free next-day delivery!)

I’ve done screen-casting in the past and find it a valuable teaching method for showing students and teachers how to use various types of software, both desktop and online. I also used it quite a lot to produce narrated videos of my animated PowerPoint presentations for Library Lessons. (Once MS upgraded Office with the ability to send a PPT directly to video, I didn’t have to do that anymore.) There is a distinct advantage to engaging students with a narrated, animated PPT video rather than a static presentation through something like SlideShare. Although I’m retired I plan to produce some online lessons and will again be using screen-casting software of some kind for teaching both concepts and technology.

In the past I used Jing for screen-casting but don’t have it on my new computer yet, so thought I’d go ahead and give Screencast-O-Matic a try. Before I had a chance, I saw a post about using Screencastify with Google Chrome and decided to try that to just record the tabbed window I wanted to use. When I viewed the results it was excellent quality, but didn’t show the entire browser window—which I needed for my instructions—so had to go with Screencast-O-Matic after all. I used the quick online version, but I’m not terribly impressed with the visual quality. I may download the desktop version to see if it improves the visual quality; if not, I’ll go ahead and download Jing.

For the specific tech skill I chose to demonstrate, I decided that because a few folks in our course had had some trouble with WordPress, I’d show a couple quick ways to log in and access the utilities of the site. I hope it will help future classes. You can see it embedded below.

(I also finally finished the “Working with WordPress #2” PDF guide and uploaded it to the JumpStart files page. I hope it helps folks better understand the way Pages and Menus/Categories are set up for this course.)