How To Use Screencasts, Instagram and Flipagram

🔺🔺🔺MY INSTAGRAM FEED HERE🔺🔺🔺

Created with Screencast-o-matic

Created with Adobe Spark 

Instagram and Flipagram

Both Instagram and Flipagram were very hands on and fun ways to showcase student work. For activities in a Spanish classroom, like mine, where students have the opportunity to work on realia, there is hardly a better way to share their creations with them and their parents.  As the curator of those feeds, taking a picture or short video does not feel like an involved process, so I am more likely to take a quick moment to share out at the drop of a hat.

Both Instagram and Flipagram can also be used by the students to submit work, share things they find interesting pertaining to the class, or to play a cultural and linguistic scavenger hunt around the city, taking and sharing pictures of Spanish words they encounter every day in their lives.

These two tools cannot be used without some element of risk for misuse.  When working with middle school students this a risk educators must sometimes take , but if expectations are set for their proper use, and consequences given for their misuse, the learning benefits will outweigh the risk.

Screencasts

Screencast-o-Matic

Using Screencast-o-Matic was extremely intuitive and simple.  The steps were clear and the on-screen buttons were easily accessible.  Downloading and saving the screen-cast video was as simple as saving a Word document.  Retrieving it was also uncomplicated.  Using screen-casts in any class can be a powerful  tool.  It helps to archive lessons, to record them for flipped lessons, to give extra help to students with certain learning disabilities, to provide instruction for students who are absent, and the list goes on.

Being able to go about using a website in real time and simply recording as we go made it appealing to me.  There was no need to set up anything, making it a tools that I would definitely consider using in my Spanish class.

Adobe Spark

Adobe spark was both easy and not easy to use.  It was great to be able to record and erase audio recordings with a simple click of a button.  I could pace myself better and if I made a mistake when narrating I could easily delete the audio and start again.  Once I had all my images saved and added, the recording process was a breeze.

The process of having to screenshot the iPad on which I was working was not as simple.  Sometimes I had to consider that I would have to give very explicit explanations of what I wanted the students to do, and I had to go back to the website, in this case Quizlet, and take a screenshot again, making sure I could see the buttons that I would instruct students to click on.

For different purposes both Screencast-o-Matic and Adobe Spark would be great tools in a foreign language class like mine.  As a librarian this is something I would be very excited about, to share with both teachers and students.

Jing

The last tool, Jing, was not a tool that I was able to use.  On my computer running Windows 10, downloading the programming was not successful.  I did go online to find how it was used, but the tutorials alone told me that getting familiar with the program would be challenging.  Perhaps with enough time to try and learn it would be a worthy tool, but at this moment, the technology was not as user friendly as both Adobe Spark and Screencast-o-Matic.

Of all the screencasting tools I used or tried to use, Screencast-o-Matic is the one I like best and that I would use in the future in the class and as a librarian.