Day 11– Screencasting on a Windows 8 Tablet for the Flipped Classroom
A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 11
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Today I did some preliminary screencast testing on the Samsung Ativ Smart PC 500T Tablet with mixed results. One of the value added benefits for students watching educational videos is the ability to stop, rewind, and review a video as many times as necessary to understand the material being presented. With the advancements in technology the creation of sceencasts is now within reach of the average teacher.
Screencasting has made it to mainstream teachers largely due to the popularization of the flipped teaching model pioneered by Sal Khan of the Khan Academy. In the flipped classroom students are assigned to watch videos outside of class for homework instead of working on problems. When they come to the classroom the next day the teacher uses the classroom time to work on projects/problems that would normally be homework. This allows the teacher to walk around the room and provide individual attention to students that may need some extra help. So essentially what used to be face-to-face lectures can be delivered in a screencast format viewed at home and the homework is done during class time thus “flipping” the classroom. It also allows for individual customization of the curriculum by letting students pace themselves as they master content.
It is an entirely different conversation whether the merits of the flipped classroom constitute an advancement in learning but teachers are experimenting with new pedagogies that require the production of online videos and screencasting is becoming increasingly popular among educators. Teacher created videos can be very time consuming to produce and thus my interests in using a tablet to create screencasts. Since the Ativ 500T has a digitizer, the S Pen Stylus will be very useful in annotating notes and illustrations and provide for more flexibility than using just a keyboard and mouse.
One of my favorite screencasting creation tools is Camtasia by Techsmith, Inc. Since the Ativ Tablet uses the Clover Trail processor it can run most x86 programs. Camtasia is fairly expensive, around $200 educational price, but it has many high-end features that make it desirable for recording screencasts. I downloaded the free 30 day trial of Camtasia 8 Studio (242MB) and installed it on the Ativ tablet today.
To see an example screencast of a Smart Board Tips and Tricks video created with Camtasia visit the ITC YouTube Channel.
I have been using version 7 of Camtasia on my Desktop computer so the interface was familiar to me. This is another benefit of being able to run familiar x86 applications on this tablet. I pinned the Camtasia program to the taskbar on the Desktop portion of the Ativ tablet. I double-clicked the Camtasia icon, selected record Full Screen and then pressed the Record button. It began counting down 3, 2, 1 and then said press F10 ro stop recording. Oops, I do not have a keyboard connected at this point so there is no F10 to press to stop the recording. Thoughts of my hard drive filling up flashed through my head then I thought I would bring up the onscreen keyboard. Oops again, the onscreen keyboard does not have function keys. In the end it was easy to stop the recording as I was able to click on the Camtasia Icon on the taskbar and press the Stop button. Whew.
Making a short 2 minute screencast was easy. I did not do any editing of the original screencast but if I were posting the screencast to YouTube I would most likely do some edits. The next step I chose was PRODUCE and I selected to produce a 720P HD video in MP4 format. After selecting the format I began the rendering process. Rendering took a very, very, long time. It took approximately 30 minutes to render the 2 minute screencast to a 720P MP4 format. Once rendering completed however the results looked great!!! The slower rendering time I am sure was due to the Z2760 Clover Trail Atom processor being a slower processor than I am typically use to on a full-size Desktop.
If all you were doing were short 5 minute or less videos then screencasting on this tablet might be tolerable. For anything longer than that the rendering times will become too excessive to be productive (patience is not one of my virtues). I will continue experimenting with some short 1 minute screencasts on this tablet as I want to use the S Pen to create some screencasts with digital ink. I wonder if I can save the initial recorded screencast as a Camtasia Project on a USB thumb drive and then transfer the files to a Desktop with a faster processor to do the heavy editing and rendering??? Worth a try I guess, has anyone successfully done this?
Another possibility is to buy the newer Windows 8 tablets on the market with the Intel Core i5 processors that will be much faster. A second version of the Microsoft Surface is coming out in January that will have an i5 processor. The new i5 Surface will also have a higher 1920x1080 screen resolution that will produce sharper videos so this class of device may be more suitable for producing screencasts. As I refresh some of my older equipment at home the i5 Surface may be worth a look as a laptop replacement for me.
Discovery of the Day – Sound output options when using external displays
Following up on yesterdays post about external displays I wanted to mention the two options for sound output when using an external display. First, if you are lucky enough to connect through the microHDMI into a HDMI port (like to a HDTV) then your sound problems are solved. HDMI transmits both video and audio so just one cable is needed to connect to a HDMI projector or HDTV to have picture and sound.
If you are using a VGA adapter you will need to also connect an external speaker of some sort to the tablet using the 3.5mm headphone jack located at the top left hand corner of the Ativ 500T tablet. VGA only carries the video signal so if you want to use a sound source other than your tablet speakers (which are not loud enough for classroom use) be sure to use the headphone jack as an output to a set of speakers that will be loud enough for all students in class to hear.
Keep on Learning,
Dr. Grissom
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