Screencasting, A Trending Topic

Yesterday in my Digital Communications class we learned about screen casts. Screen casts are starting to be a new popular way of communicating. Mrs. Runkel had us to do an activity where we watched a podcast and we were expected to follow the instructions. Our activity was to make the image that the screen caster was making. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But it's nice because you are able to repeat the things that you didn't hear the first time. Or if you did not understand what he was asking you were able to go back and replay it. The speaker was talking pretty fast and I had to click pause every couple of seconds so I knew specifically where to go.

We also learned what was the difference between a good podcast and a bad one. There was one example Mrs.Runkel showed and they were a lot of distractions or the speaker did not know exactly where to go or how to say it which made it unclear. It shows that explaining concepts may not look as easy as you think they are. I also wanted to show two screen casts. I chose one screen cast that was good and one that was not as good.



I thought this video was good because there were no distractions and I was engaged the whole time. Even though there was not a speaker. They decided to use text instead, sometimes in this case it can be better especially if the speaker can not explain him/herself very well. The video was simple and also made its point.



This video is a tutorial on the computer game tetris. There is a lot of stuff going on here. There is music playing and there are paragraphs of texts telling you how to play the game with different colors and fonts. It's not good because there is too much going on. A reader will not be able to concentrate watching this because there is a song playing plus there are directions that are to be read. Eventually the reader will not pay attention at all. The video is pointless and does not accomplish what it needs to.