screencast assignment - Nov. 30

I chose to do a SMART Recorder video for my assignment. I used this to teach a lesson to my 8th and 9th bell classes while I was out during a teacher inservice. This is an awesome thing to do for planned absences. Instead of giving the kids review assignments when you're out, you can "teach" new concepts; not wasting a day of instruction. This is valuable because there are so many OAT standards to teach, you really can't afford to lose days of instruction when you're absent. It is a little weird making one, because you're teaching a lesson while there's no one in the classroom. The custodian walked in while I was making the recording, and gave me a funny look. I can't blame him; I was talking to an empty classroom, writing on the SMART Board, all while wearing a wireless microphone on my head! The nice thing is that you can press "pause" while making the recording if you need a minute, and press "record" again when you're ready to start back up. If you were paused for 15 minutes, it doesn't miss a beat on the recording. You can already have a pre-made SMART Notebook lesson to do your recording on. It doesn't have to be made from scratch. Saving the recording can take a few minutes, depending on how long your recording was. My recording is about 12-13 minutes, and it took about 5 minutes to save. I saved it to my desktop, and later imported it to my website. That way, I just had to tell the sub to go to my website (which any kid could show them how to do), and click on "8th and 9th Bell lesson." It is a little time consuming, but the kids get so much more out of it than just doing review problems, and they think it's pretty cool.