If you’ve stuck with me this far into the blog, then – firstly — thank you! Secondly, this means you’re either already practicing screencast, or you’re open to trying it. If you are a practitioner, then this episode is for you: I’ll share my top tips to help you optimise your screencast feedback.
To dive right in, my top four tips are:
- Tip 1: Make a game plan for your screencast
- Tip 2: Team up with Teams
- Tip 3: Keep an eye on your time
- Tip 4: Tell an engaging story
But if you’re a nervous newbie, tempted by screencast but not yet ready to take the plunge, this episode is also for you! Hopefully you were persuaded by the theory in Episode 3 and the evidence from students in Episode 4. You may even have tried some quick wins from Episode 2. But you’re not sure of your next small steps, or whether you should even take what seems like a giant leap. I hope the tips here should give you some confidence to develop your practice in a way that works for you and delivers value for students.
(And if you haven’t been reading since the start, and are wondering what you’ve wandered into, do go back to the first episode. This sets the scene and makes the case for screencast as a dialogic form of feedback. If that interests you, continue with the other episodes, and we’ll wait for you here…)
How these tips will help you
If you’re like me, you’d rather not read the instructions! I prefer to plunge in, maybe glance at the quick start guide, but learn the ‘system’ by actually using it. I’ll only turn to the manual if I get into trouble, or want to try the advancedfeatures. In our screencast context, the good practice guide is a ‘manual’ – you can read it as a supporting document, selectively, pick and choose to suit your teaching needs. The tips here are one’s I wish I’d heard before I started using screencast.
- For the novice, the tips below offer an ‘orientation’ or warm-up to give you the big picture. If these make sense, then turn to the guide for step-by-step instructions. (See Section 1 for how to use the guide to suit your needs; see Section 3 to help you decide how ready you are for screencast.)
- For the practitioner, these tips will either reinforce your existing approach, or help you fine tune it – or, even better, prompt you to suggest ways I could improve my approach and the guidance!
Let’s dive in…
Tip 1: Make a game plan for your screencast
Before you start a recording session, make a rough outline for the steps you will go through. Even for a one-off or ad hoc recording, a simple workflow will make the process more efficient. A plan reduces uncertainty (and thus the risk of things going awry), lowers the stress on you, and makes the steps more repeatable later. I suggest something like my Five R’s game plan (see the figure) from Section 5 of the guide. This sets out what you are going to do, and how. Tailor this to your situation and technological preferences.
Now you have a basic plan, but what recording technology should you use? For many people, the tech is the intimidating barrier at which they baulk. But it shouldn’t be: you already know how to do this!
Tip 2: Team up with Teams
You already have the necessary tools at hand; you probably use them every day. Microsoft Teams is one of those. A simple and effective way to create screencasts is to:
- start a Teams meeting for just you (in a suitably ‘private’ channel)
- then share to the ‘meeting’ the work on which you want to comment (and no, you don’t need to show your face if you don’t want to!)
- then record yourself ‘walking and talking’ through the work on screen.
This might sound quick and dirty. But fast is good – there’s not much overhead in setting up or sharing the results, and the quality is plenty high enough for effective screencast – there’s no need to spend time editing the video unless there are more than a few seconds of ‘dead air’ at the beginning or end (and even then, the recipient can fast forward!). But keep in mind the following privacy concerns.
- Only the intended audience should be able to play the screencast.
- That’s true whether it’s a whole cohort of students, a subset (e.g., a coursework group), an individual student, such as a tutee, or selected academic colleagues.
- The ‘safest’ way to control access is to make the screencast in your own private Teams group (which you can set up for yourself).
- Unless you’re confident navigating Teams and Sharepoint file sharing and preferences, I suggest you default to making the screencast in your own private Teams space, then upload or share it from there to other Teams groups or channels or via email.
See Section 6 of the guide for step by step instructions, and the MS Teams support pages for guidance on recording a meeting.
Although I’m confident in using a range of video recording tools, I usually default to Teams because it’s convenient and very effective. If you want to indulge in more advanced video production, by all means do so if you have the skills. But don’t spend extra time adding little extra value: effective screencast feedback depends on content-rich narratives, notslick sound and vision. As long as your audience can clearly hear your voice and read the screen, that’s all you need!
Tip 3: Keep an eye on your time
One of the benefits of screencast is that you can convey far more information per second in speech than you can in writing. But it’s easy to over-do it — to say too much or talk too long. I think we academics in particular have a propensity to over-explain or re-explain things to students, to keep talking through an issue until we’ve attacked it from all sides, until we feel we’ve reached ‘saturation’ (did I just over-explain this!?!). Avoid that risk in screencast:
- Think through the key ideas and improvements you want to get across before you record.
- You might take very brief notes to refer to in your recording. But instead, colour code the text as you read it through the first time.
- This gives you a guide to use when you’re ready to record, e.g., yellow for ‘good’ stuff you want to commend, ‘pink’ for items that warrant some critique. You shouldn’t need more than two or three categories. (And these are my colour preferences: you do you!)
- As you are recording, when you get to the colour coded text, it will jog your memory for what you want to say about that section.
- Colour coding can also keep you on track, preventing you from covering every piece of a text (you wouldn’t do that in written feedback either, would you?!). Use the colour codes to focus on the most important or most representative parts of the work.
The colour coding isn’t just for your benefit. Inform the students up front what you’re doing, so they know how to use the screencast – which brings me on to the final tip…
Tip 4: Tell an engaging story
To work well, a screencast should be engaging, personal, and motivating, as well as specific and detailed. For the recipient, it should feel like a conversation, or at the very least that they are listening to an important story made just for them. And you are the story-teller. To tell a good dialogic story:
- Remember you’re talking to a person; address them by name, say ‘hi and bye’, bring them in to the process
- Inject some energy into your narrative, if not humour and enthusiasm. Vary your tone and emphasis.
- Like any good story, you need a structure: a beginning, a middle, and an end…
In the beginning:
Tell your viewer what’s going to happen and how they can watch and learn. For example:
“Hi there, Lloyd. Thanks for your draft chapter. I’m going to talk through it and make some suggestions. But these are selective: I won’t cover every line. So please extrapolate from these to find other areas where you can make similar improvements.
The colour coding will help me focus on the major points I want to make: the yellow are things you do well and should do more of. The pink are areas I think could be improved. As you listen through, pause, take notes, rewind – whatever works for you.
At the end I’ll summarise and suggest you outline some bullet points for action: specific things you will do in response to my feedback to improve your work, or questions you’d like to ask me for clarification. Now let’s begin…”
The meat in the middle:
This is your ‘narrative content’, providing clear suggestions for improvement, the examples, the encouragements to ‘do more of this and less of that’.
“I liked what you did here, a very clear illustration of the issue. Nice one. …
This paragraph was a bit vague, and seemed more like an assertion than an argument. You might refer to (Fletcher, 1988) to build an argument, especially if you add in an example to make it clearer. …”
In the end: summarise and sign off, and make a call to action:
“I hope this has been helpful. I suggest writing some bullet points of specific things you’ll do now to improve the chapter, and send them to me to check. We can then have a follow-up conversation if anything still isn’t clear. …”
See Section 8 of the guide for more ideas on narrative structure, content, and tone.
Final thoughts
I hope the following overarching points will encourage you to develop your screencast practice. I know they would have helped me when I started!
- Don’t worry about the tech. Making effective screencasts is not a technological issue. The tech should just be an enabler for your dialogue. We try not to let ‘telephone technology’ (or Teams, or Zoom, or Skype) prevent us from talking to someone at long distance: the ‘phone’ serves the conversation. Yes, sometimes it gets in the way. But if we can master it we can focus on our dialogues. Don’t let the tech intimidate you!
- It’s about people. With the tech just ‘doing its job’ we can focus on making screencast feedback feel like a learning conversation, human-to-human. That’s where you should focus your energy and expertise. See page 25 of the guide to help you ‘remember who you’re talking to’.
- Know what you’re getting into. Don’t go into this lightly: you, and your students, may get the habit! If you’re already a screencast practitioner, then you know that screencast, when done well, is very popular with students: they find it more effective than traditional written feedback. Once you get the hang of it, there may be no going back! You may create an expectation that all of your feedback will be dialogic screencast. So if you’re worried about over-committing or consistency across a teaching team or cohort, use screencast selectively on individuals before deciding to scale up.
- Enjoy it! Most people who use screencast find it more enjoyable and fulfilling than writing traditional feedback: we can more readily express ourselves and connect with our interlocutors. I find it more energising than writing, less of a chore. And screencast can take less time and provide more bang for the buck (or ‘minute’), which is always something to celebrate!
If you’re already a screencast practitioner, hopefully these suggestions have reinforced, if not added something to your tool kit. If you have further ideas (or disagreements) I’d love to hear from you.
If you’re a novice, I hope these ideas will encourage you to try more screencast, making use of ‘the manual’ for detailed guidance and support. Let me know how you get on, or if you’d like a personal tutorial or a talk to your team about using screencast.
In the final episode, I’ll wrap things up by talking about how to integrate screencast into your curriculum and an over-arching feedback process. It’s important to make sure screencast is more than just a transactional or ad hoc convenience, but lives up to its promise as a potent dialogic practice to stimulate learning conversations.
