In this screencast I'm going to provide a few suggestions on how to study using screencasts
because screencasts are fairly extensively available for many areas, and the idea for
screencasts is that information can be delivered outside of class and they can be then used
at the user's pace.
And this ability to use at the user's pace is a huge advantage of screencasts.
Also studies have shown that screencast usage correlates significantly with performance
in a course.
So what I want to do is look at some practical aspects of how you might use screencasts,
and perhaps the biggest is that with this screencast you can pause, you can also of
course rewind, and watch something again, and so the idea is you really can go at your
own pace, something's not clear, you can rewind.
The other aspect of pausing is that if you're looking at, for example, a problem solution,
pause and then work it on your own.
In other words, without watching the solution of the screencast, try and work it.
This certainly relates to what we've talked about in screencasts on how to study, namely
that testing yourself is one of the most effective ways, so if you try and do the problem, even
if you can't do it, but if you try and do the problem first before watching the screencast,
it's going to improve your ability to do subsequent problems.
Another thing you can do to use screencasts more effectively is you can change the speed,
instead of normal we could have it go faster, or we can slow it down and go at half-speed
or quarter-speed to give us more time to digest the information.
And of course we can hit play and pause and we can rewind to help us understand and check
something instead of just going through directly.
You also can use the closed caption option.
So for example, if we were watching this screencast we could click over on the closed captioning
and the words that are being spoken would also show up at the bottom of the screen.
You have to keep in mind however, that many of these closed caption displays are not corrected,
what I mean is software creates the closed captioning and it may not correspond very
well, the voice recognition may not be very good, so unless it's indicated that that has
been corrected you should use this carefully.
Another way that you can take advantage of screencasts is to actually watch it with more
than one person watching, namely watch in groups where you can ask each other questions,
if you're confused about an aspect, sort of like sometimes in class when you turn to a
neighbor and try and whisper "I didn't follow this part, can you explain it to me?"
Here you can ask someone else who is also watching to help you understand some aspect
of it.
So screencasts can be also effective in use, not just learning material but also reviewing
for exams, and again test yourself, pause, try and do the problem first, lay out a plan
for a solution, for example, of an example problem before doing it, and in all cases
when you're using screencasts try and take advantage of aspects discussed in the "how
to study" screencasts.
As I've mentioned, testing yourself, distributing screencasts over days and material you want
to learn by spreading the time between them and asking yourself when you watch something
on a screencast "why is this statement true?"
Really making sure you understand it before moving on.
So there are a large number of screencasts available for a variety of topics that can
really help you improve understanding of material.