This week our class was taught by Rich McCue. For the first bit of the class, we were taught about educational videos and some of the science behind them. One point that arose was that people will remember less content from a digital presentation if the words spoken are also written on the presentation slides. This concept was taught to me in my early years of high school while I was enrolled in the project-based learning program, and I feel that it is an inherently obvious fact. If you look at a company like Apple giving a presentation on their new iPhone, you’ll note that they don’t display blocks of text on the screen because they know it won’t catch the audience’s interest. Similarly, TED talks use a giant presentation screen that often projects visuals that relate to what the presenter is saying. I am glad that future teachers are being taught about memorable presentations since it means that fewer students will have to sit through lessons where the instructor reads points off of a slideshow that the learners could just read themselves.

For the lab component of the class, we were introduced to a screen capture application which we could use to create an educational video. I thought this was a nice application since it is versatile and easily accessible from my web browser. It also allowed me to choose whether I wanted to capture just my browser tab or my whole desktop screen, which is versatility that I appreciate. I already use a screen capture application on my desktop at home, but this new application called Screencastify seems like a good option for my laptop.

Here is the video that I made:

It was just a quick experimentation type of thing, so the quality isn’t spectacular. I still put effort into the editing and video creation, but I could do much better if I were in a quiet setting with a proper microphone.