Providing student support

Even though I have not posted in the last few weeks, I have been busy checking out lots of new tools. For my “first look” tool in this post, I have chosen Screencast-O-Matic.

Often, as online teachers, we find ourselves asking students to use tools they may not have previously used. In those circumstances, it’s good to provide a little support in the form of a quick start guide or tutorial. Most of us provide text tutorials, but sometimes video tutorials can be more helpful - especially to certain types of learners. That’s where Screencast-O-Matic comes in handy.

Screencast-O-Matic is an online screen capture service that is very easy to use. It allows you to capture anything on your screen and then either upload it to their server as a public or private file or download it to your computer so you can put it where you wish. I was able to create and publish this brief screencast of exporting bookmarks in IE7 in just a few minutes.

This tool works with Windows XP with browsers IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2.0 and Mac OS X with Safari 2.0.4 and Firefox 2.0. The file format of the video screen capture is .mov so folks will need quicktime to see it online. Of course, if you download it for placement somewhere else, you could always convert it to an mp4 which may be more accessible by different players (Windows Media Player, Real Media Player, Quicktime, etc.).

This is just a preliminary review. If anyone has experience with this or similar tools, a comment would be very much appreciated.

Oh - one last thing - although the screencast-o-matic folks don’t mention support for vista, I did the screencast using Windows Vista with IE7 and I didn’t run into any problems.