Toast your screen
I am always in the pursuit of handy little apps that can enhance my teaching. In my math classes, I found myself explaining certain concepts over and over again, walking through the various steps of a problem. I wondered if there was a way I could walk through a problem, record it, and make it available to my students. Valor has issued the math teachers tablet PC’s, so I started thinking about using the tablet functions to enhance student learning.
I figured it might be possible to record myself doing a problem on my tablet PC and then post it online at my math website. It just seemed like it would be too time-consuming to do that. That’s when I ran across Screentoaster.
Screentoaster runs a Java applet that will record your screen or a portion of the screen, with or without audio. Since its a Java applet, it is compatible on any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux). After recording, you can make quick annotations which appear at the bottom of the screencast. After finishing the video, you upload it to Screentoaster, which then makes it available via link, embedding, or as a downloadable .mov or .swf file. The quality is fantastic while the file size is incredibly small.
Here’s an example of a math problem I worked out and posted to my website:
Tagged as Screentoaster + Categorized as Tech, Tech, Websites