Day 30 – Creating Screencasts and Flipping the Classroom with the Surface RT
30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet
Well, we made it!
Day 30.
Day 30.
Thank you for being a reader of the 30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers blog series. I hope to have helped in some small way to answer a few of the questions I have been getting about using the Surface RT in the classroom. This innovative device has been misunderstood by many and my posts over the past 30 days have given me a new insight and appreciation for this new class of device.
I have embedded a YouTube video I created on the Surface RT at the end of this blog post showing my final app pick in action.
I have embedded a YouTube video I created on the Surface RT at the end of this blog post showing my final app pick in action.
Going into this blog series I really did not expect the Surface RT to even be a contender with producing multimedia content, but I have been proven wrong over the past week. The Surface RT is a great creation device with the ability to easily create and share content via the built-in USB port or other cloud services like SkyDrive.
As a follow-up to yesterday I put my ideas to the test and produced a short little video using the Surface RT back-facing video camera and the Movie Edit Touch app. I have posted an example video to YouTube so you can see how you might use the Surface RT to document a field trip. This took me about five minutes to shoot and edit and another 20 minutes to render to a 1080P video. I could have cut the render time significantly if I encoded it to 720P but was curious if the Surface RT could handle the 1080P processing, it did. Below is a YouTube video of my first multimedia project I created on the Surface RT.
So, it is indeed impressive that we now have the Surface RT device that currently is at an educational price of $199 that can produce video content from the field and have it available on YouTube in well under an hour. Amazing times we live in, what will you teach the world today with your Surface RT?
At less than half the cost of other tablets on the market the Surface RT has a lot to offer educators. In addition to many valuable apps in the Windows Store it can run the Office 2013 applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. It also has expandable storage to easily move content on and off the device, perfect for easy classroom sharing. The Surface RT offers tremendous value and is a worthy choice for teaching and learning purposes.
After being impressed by the video editing capabilities of the Surface RT I thought I would finish this series with one of the hottest trends in education circles today that also requires the production of videos, the flipped classroom.
Screencasting on the Surface RT - Record Voice & Pen
One of the remaining challenges for the Surface RT is if it can easily produce screencasts for flipping the classroom. The answer is…. yes it can.
A screencast is simply a recording of everything you write on a touchscreen along with your voice. Think of it as recording everything you do on a whiteboard except you are now using the touchscreen of the Surface RT.
The best app I have found, to date, for screencasting on the Surface RT is Record Voice & Pen. This app also works on other Windows 8 tablets and comes in both a free and paid version. When you first open Record Voice & Pen you will be presented with a whiteboard screen with a few annotation tools available for you to use in your recording.
There is a Pen tool and a palette of color choices if you want to change the color of the Pen as you record your lesson. You can change the color and thickness of the Pen tool at any time in the recording. You can also hide the tool choices if you need to draw in an area of the screen that they cover up. The recording process only records your pen annotations so do not worry about the overlay on the screen, it is just there so you can change Pen colors or if you want to add an image to annotate on top of. Changing colors during the lesson can draw the students attention to an area of the screen that is pertinent to the lesson.
The free version will place the word PREVIEW across your screencast recording if you use images. If you purchase the app this PREVIEW watermark will not show on your recordings.
I like Record Voice & Pen so much that it was one of the first apps I purchased from the store. I also went ahead and purchased the Movie Edit Touch and ShowBiz apps after yesterdays blog post. After 30 Days with the Surface RT I have only purchased 3 apps.
Record Voice & Pen also offers the ability to record multiple screens in one recording setting. If you purchase the Record Voice & Pen for $3.49 in the Windows Store you can also add JPG or PNG images to your screencast and annotate on top of the images. This is great if you already have a prepared PowerPoint made as you can just save your PowerPoint slides as image files and add them to Record Voice & Pen BEFORE you start your recording. By prepping the slide images in advance you can easily move from one slide to another when you make the recording to keep the flow going.
I created a very fast-paced screencast of Record Voice & Pen and uploaded it to the EIU ITC YouTube Channel available here:
Believe it or not, I have more to say about the Surface RT but it will need to wait a couple of days as today is the first day back-to-school. If you asked me 30 days ago if I would have needed more than 30 days to answer my questions about the Surface RT I would not have believed it.
The Surface RT still has a few secrets left to discover for teaching and learning.
The Surface RT still has a few secrets left to discover for teaching and learning.
So there you have it, the finale of the 30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers is the Record Voice & Pen app for all of your screencasting needs.
Surface RT Rocks!
Until next time...
Keep on Learning,
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, PhD
Follow me on Twitter
@tomgrissom
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