Screencasts on Google Classroom

6th Grade ELA

Melissa Onstad & Annamarie Scavarda

A sixth grader watches a teacher-created screencast that covers how to write an introduction. When he finishes watching the tutorial, he will decide between revising an introduction from a previous assignment and writing a new introduction based on a prompt provided by the teacher.

Problem Identified: Students were asking us for opportunities to independently “upgrade” or improve their mastery of specific Learning Outcomes.

Hypothesis: If we post screencasts of lessons that are tied to 1 specific learning outcome on google classroom then the students will be able to upgrade their rating on that learning outcome as measured by the total number of students mastering that outcome.

Data Collection: On Google Classroom, we posted four different tutorials with accompanying Mastery Checks. Twenty students completed a Mastery Check aligned to Learning Outcomes around writing introductions. Thirteen students turned in work to show mastery of writing conclusions. Sixteen students turned in work to show mastery of punctuation (specifically, correct commas usage). Two students turned in work aligned to finding the theme of a story.

Actionable Step: Our first step was to make a decision about how to get the screencasts to the kids. We chose to share our screencasts on our Google Classroom website so having a class website would be useful, but you could always share the screencasts with them through email. The next step was to decide what the focus/purpose of our screencasts would be. We chose to use screencasting to help the students improve their mastery on specific learning outcomes. We then chose learning outcomes that the students were struggling with and separated them into the different screencast videos. In our research, we noticed that you can use screencasts in many different ways within the classroom so you can choose however you would like to use screen casting in the classroom. We then decided on a system to use. Quicktime seemed to be the easiest. Other options are showme or liverecorder. Next you will need to record the screencast. Make sure that you type out what you want to say so that recording runs smoothly. You will also want to make sure that you are in a very quiet room, because the recording device will pick up a lot more sound than you think.

Overall Findings/Impact: We found that students appreciated having access to “upgrade” assignments they could complete independently. They also enjoyed using the headphones and watching videos. A benefit for teachers was that after our initial preparation of the screencasts and assignments (which took some serious time!), daily planning time was decreased.

However, using screencasts had some significant disadvantages. At times, we felt that the presence of headphones and the focus on screens made the learning process impersonal. It was difficult for us to find an entry point for interacting with students. In other words, students were more likely to flounder on alone and do the work incorrectly and were less likely to take the headphones off and ask for teacher help.

In the future, we would probably mitigate the impersonal nature of this delivery method by having some students work on upgrade Mastery Checks independently (with headphones, viewing screencasts) while others work in small groups with the teacher. We could also use the work students submit to pull small groups for follow-up face-to-face teaching.