Screencastify

I moved into Ed tech a couple of years ago and one of the first things I was asked to do was to pass my master caster course. Nope, me either! An embarrassed Google later and I discovered Screencastify. It's a great recording tool in Google Chrome that allows you to record your screen with or without your webcam included or just record your webcam. The beauty of working on a chrome book is that you always have a webcam and microphone ready to go. Screencastify is not paying me for this post. No one pays me for my posts. There are alternatives to Screencastify; Loom, Screencastomatic, Awesome Screenshot, Nimbus, Hippo Video and We Video to name a few. All have their merits and a place in my heart and much of what I'm about to talk about can be achieved on all these tools. But none with the ease that I have found with Screencastify. 

I have openly admitted that I struggle with questioning in my lessons. I can ask for the answer, I can ask for someone to explain the answer but I can't pick pose pause pounce bounce or any other iterations. Questioning is not my strength. Likewise feedback. I can do right or wrong, I can do corrections needed. I can do next steps or go back over this, but, I can't do Star or any other iterations. I'm not sure if it's me or if its subject specific but I am not the best at either. I am especially poor at giving feedback on mock papers. I have built Google forms to help (and blogged about these previously, read about them here) but when I am marking I am going through a process and because I have three papers for each of my 22 learners per group, I don't have the time or the inclination to handwrite this process down. This is where Screencastify changed the game. 

I was sat marking a paper and I wanted to give the student full marks, the page was full of working out! The final answer was incorrect but not a million miles away. Yet I had to score the answer zero. Imagine being that learner and seeing that effort not being rewarded with a single mark. Previously I would have written, "you've gone on the wrong track, let's have a chat". That was the best I could do in the time allocated to mark that question. Not insightful for the learner, and requiring them to ask me for more information. The change is now I sit with my chrome book open as I mark and when I come to a question like this, I flick on Screencastify with my webcam only and chat as I mark. (the chrome book isn't fully open as to see what I'm writing the camera needs to be angled so the chrome book is partially open which often results in my colleagues entering my room to check today isn't the day I finally lose it as they think I'm talking to myself! I need a sign for my door to say recording in process!!!) 

I can orate to the learner how I am marking their answer. I can explain that if you used an incorrect method that arrived at this answer it is automatically a zero mark answer. I can explain that if you had carried on with this piece of working out here part way down the page you would have got 2 marks but because it was replaced with this working out it is a zero. This is powerful because the learner can hear my voice. They can hear my empathy, they can hear the effort I have put in to marking their work. I can flash them the mark scheme and show them what it says, this informs the learner and helps them decide on what they will do next. The learner doesn't have to come to me for feedback. I can post this just to them on Google classroom and they can privately reflect. They can reply with video too if they want to have another attempt. Or they can reply with their thoughts and feelings on my marking. This powerful because they can see their mistakes and the impact these had in a 1 minute video and they don't have to leave their house! They don't need to be in class to hear this, they don't need to ask a peer "what did you get for Q8 I got nothing but I wrote loads?". Screencastify is helping create a clarity in what we need to do next to improve. 

Once I have marked a batch of papers, much like a chief examiner, I can pick out things that went well as a theme and not so well. I can use my analysis grid (I have blogged about these before read about my love of them here!) I can see as a group what we did well on and what we can improve on. I can record this as a video with Screencastify. Very quickly I can explain an overall class picture, I can hide the names on my analysis grid and include my webcam as I talk over the whole class results. Including my webcam is not something I enjoy but I recognise the power of my learners feeling connected and seeing my expressions as I explain. I can explain that because we all did well on this we won't be coming back to it in class so it's something the learner needs to keep ticking over at home. I can explain that because we didn't do well on this as a class that we are going to need to spend a bit of time on it next lesson and what I need the learners to do to prepare. Screencastify is helping create a clarity in what our next steps are. 

If there is a particular question that many have done poorly on, I can model answers. I can quickly open Screencastify, webcam only, tilt my chrome book and model my working out on certain questions. I can show my learners what we were looking for. I can explain it in the way that we learnt it in class, using the examples we looked at linking to the event of the lesson, triggering memories in my learners. I can explain my frustrations at poor exam etiquette and illegible handwriting. My learners can reflect on this exam without leaving their home, just by picking up their phone they can see my Google classroom video on whole class feedback. Screencastify is helping create a clarity with that feedback. 

This was all before COVID and before things changed. Screencastify has now come more to the forefront as we look at blended learning becoming the normal. I can now talk over my slides like I would have done in class. I can share my screen and flick between resources. I can embed my webcam so my learners can see my face and feel connected to me. Screencastify allows me to plan as normal (ish) I can record my content that allows those outside the classroom to learn at their own pace. It allows them to go back over things they are unclear on. It helps them personalise their own learning in developing their understanding of the content. 

I also love to use Screencastify to orate my curation of resources. I have been using it to talk over my lesson plan and record why I chose that approach and that tool or that website for colleagues to help them begin planning for blended learning. But this is also powerful for my learners. I am now giving them choice boards of much wider choices as I am no longer constrained  by device limits or photocopying limits. In this choice though I want to explain why I have chosen what I have chosen as a resource and at what point in the learning journey a learner might want to access that resource. I can explain that "this website is great for this but I think it would sequence better if you practised with this task before you give the website activity a go". I can give my learners choice but explain why I have curated in this way. I can also orate my expectations of the tasks and how I will be giving feedback. Screencastify is helping me create clarity in why and what we are doing. 

The incredible ease of using Screencastify in a GSuite environment is that it automatically saves to My Drive. You can change the sharing settings to all within the domain in one click. In one click you can share your video to Google classroom. In one click you can export as an Mp4. In one click you can open the editor and begin easily editing and inserting more clips. It launches from chrome on 1 click too. It is an easy to use tool. I appreciate I have a premium account, and lack of editing and video length are an issue for free accounts, but I don't think premium is prohibitively expensive. Yes, I accept premium is significantly better than a free account. But all the one click sharing tools that I just described are available on the free account. And let's be honest if you're talking for more than 5 minutes about 1 thing to your learners they may have stopped listening anyway so a free account may help you keep it concise! 

Blended Learning Quick Wins

I have just published my blog on what I plan for September and I wanted to follow it up with how I will do it. 

Cast your mind back to a lesson that required cutting paper. Perhaps they were making their own loop cards, or cutting triangles to prove Pythagoras. Remember the times you needed to stick work into books. Your lesson was planned, it ran well, but you probably had a frantic 5 minutes at one point because of the extra equipment, I know I did. In my experience finding the scissors posed a challenge, including the left handed ones. Finding the glue sticks too. Handing them out in the class, realising some students had 3 pairs and others had none. Losing glue sticks lids, the time lost to equipment diverted from valuable learning. All of this happened on more than 1 occasion to me and can still heighten anxiety, including now when I reflect. What caused me the problems was the extra equipment, to make things flow I like to give my learners everything that they will need all in 1 place. In my physical classroom I have a helpdesk where they can come up and grab maybe a device to check an idea, watch a video. It might have the scaffolding sheet for the topic, a broken down task. It might have the help sheet or template to help write a cheat sheet or multiplication grids pre drawn. It may have foreign language dictionaries. Everything that they need to access the lesson themselves, helping them be independent no matter how much assistance they need to get there.

Blended learning is going to be no different. I am going to want to put everything in one place for them. Hyperdocs then come into their own as do Hyperbooks. A hyperbook is a notebook digitally held, maybe for a unit of work. A hyperdoc is a lesson plan of everything they need for the lesson. There are different types of hyperdocs. Ones that guide through each stage of a topic, discover, explain, explore and others that are choice board in style.  I can see benefits of all of these. Mainly they help the learners be independent and progress through their learning at their own pace. The true meaning of asynchronous learning. Slidesmania is my go to place for these things. Well worth checking out. Imagine a hyperbook of tabs all within shape space and measure. Once for area, one for perimeter, one for circles, sectors, compound shapes, problem solving tiling questions, sounds good! Sounds like a lot of work from the teacher, but when was teaching not a lot of work? We are planning for a new way of learning and perhaps we could save some time in this and insert a video on the first page of each section that already exists? Is there a youtube video we could insert? Yes of course there is! Can I take a moment to recomment the brilliant Mars Maths videos, worth checking out! All we need to do in Google Slides is click Insert>Video and search for the best video for our needs.

 The beauty of Google Slides we can start the video at certain points, so only the first 2 minutes are relevant to your group? No problem! Use the start and end times! 

I accept building a hyperbook on a series of lessons within a unit is a lot of work, but ready made videos can be a real help. Like Alice Keeler says 'stop pretending Google doesn't exist' Let's use the videos that are available. Personally I will be mixing it up. I like the way I explain certain topics, you can see in my blog about, SASSYLASS for Pythagoras, ADAM for ratio, TERRY for transformations and DIN0 for nth term. I will be using a mixture of Loom, Screencastify, Hippo Video and Screencastomatic to record my explanations. I will be recording my desktop whilst I talk over my slides that I would normally use in class.

I have begun doing this for lessons and recording over my slides. In what would have been a 3 hour lesson previously I have found the actual teacher talk element is only 20 minutes when recorded. I have used the exact same slides I would talk over in class. No editing. What I found that when I would normally set them to work on the topic I have explained I have asked them to pause the video. This means that I can edit the videos into shorter videos later or leave it as 1 long video. I found that the problem with doing this is I am assuming they will get to the end point I am anticipating. I think there needs to be a mix of my own videos and ready made ones. I can select and curate existing videos to show progression, of topics I think they will get to and signpost it as such. This one is only if you got 100% on the quiz on that one. This one is if you struggled in that quiz. You get my meaning. This will all be trial and error but I was surprised that in a 3 hour lesson I only talk for 20 minutes! It feels a lot longer!

OK what about questions? Could we insert hyperlinks to a quiz in our hyperbook? I think so! 

Quizzes are quite easy, if not easier to replicate online. I think many have been using Kahoot for a while in the physical classroom. Now you can assign Kahoots for home learning. You could insert the link on a page in a hyperbook, the beauty of Google Slides is you just need to click INSERT>LINK or use CTRL+K. There are lots of existing quizzes already on Kahoot.

Another favourite for quizzing is Quizizz. You can post the quiz to your class and they can do it at home. Again there is a wide library of quizzes to choose from, so if the one you are looking for doesn't exist on Kahoot, Quizziz is a good place to look. If both of these are familiar to you and you want to change things up a bit, there are lots of others but Assistments is a good tool too. The old Transum quizzes, although can't be assigned and tracked are still great. 

Transum was around when I began teaching, starter of the day was everyone's form time activity! I like to insert the link to Transum in the hyperbook in Google Slides and ask the learner to insert a screenshot of their results underneath when finished.

Many of them are levelled and differentiated allowing learners to push on if they are finding it easy. I like that there is no sign in, they show progression, sure I accept I don't hold all the results in a nice Google Sheet, but I could type them up myself if I really wanted to! Transum has self marking on all sorts of activities and topics so for me it's on my list of places to link to.

Don't forget that in our Hyperbook, because it is in Google slides we can insert our own Google sliddes from our lesson presentation to help learners follow the topic too! Copy and paste in our summary slides or our nice examples into the hyperbook, sure! In our hyperbook then we have video, explanations, questions. All in one place! I think that if we could create a hyperbook on a unit sectioned by topic it would be a great experience for our learners. I'm now thinking it doesn't seem that much work? Maybe a little more but I think I see a way of suing some stuff that already exists?

Now what about robust questions? Teaching GCSE resit in FE means there have to be some GCSE exam questions in there. I am a big fan of both the old 1MA0 topic questions which you can find from Mr Barton here and the Corbett maths ones here. In my physical classroom I love handing these out as my consolidation exercise. Putting what we have learned in the lesson into exam context practise. But we have a problem. They are paper based pdfs, much like the real GCSE! (Which will obviously have to move on...but we will save that for another day!) This is where I hit a snag, how can I move these online? Then I hit upon ilovepdf and my life was complete! 

I convert the pdf to powerpoint. I then save the powerpoint at Google Slides. 

Once in Google Slides I insert textboxes for learners to insert their answer. This bit is fiddly but they could insert their own, I'm just being super organised! I plan to share these with the answers so it can be self marked. Whoa you say, self marking, they will all get 100% surely! Ah but the beauty of Google Slides is we can use FILE>VERSION HISTORY and see when the changes were made and what it originally looked like! 

Obviously not all my ideas are acceiboe for all, I am HUGE fan of Texthelp and for those with additional needs I would leave the pdf as is and encourage them to use the pdf reader from Texthelp. We can then screenshot or save their edited version. I haven't gone into it too much on here as I wanted to present an affordable acheivable work flow. We could use this method for all but not everyone subscribes to Texthelp products. 

There are a thousand more ideas that I could talk about for blended or distance learning but I have tried to keep it as simple as possible and as free as possible. Through my work I have seen that not all schools have access or subscriptions. I think and feel it is doable to create a unit workbook using a Slidesmania template. Inserting videos, inserting self marking quizzes and linking to exam workbooks in Google Slides format. What would be really great if we got learners to find the videos that spoke to them, if they created the content in their workbook. They research the topic, curate the resources, and design their own template. That is my aim but I know that as new as blended learning will be for me in September it will be multiplied and magnified for my learners and we can build to the top of any learning mountain. But to start with we are at the base camp and I need to help them pack their rucksack with all the right tools for the job and I think a hyperbook is the way to go!

Here is my rough first draft, welcome to copy and adapt, please click FILE>MAKE A COPY. Many thanks to Slidesmania for the template.

Example