EdTech 513 - Multimedia - Worked Example Screencast

This was our final project in this course.  Our goal was to make a worked example screencast. This topic was introduced to us in Chapters 10 through 12 in Clark and Mayer’s E-Learning and the Science of Instruction.

Our school board is pushing our teachers to use a locally developed learning and content management system called D2L - similar to Moodle.   It is the hope of the school board that our teachers design courses so that the students can have access to the same instruction whether at school, at home or on holidays.  One of the courses I teach is Financial Management.  It is a five module course that teaches topics in finance and accounting.  I decided to make this screencast on the creation of the balance sheet for two reasons.   First, the project would be put on the D2L shell and, second, some prerequisite knowledge was already learned in the first module, Personal Finance.

As I mentioned earlier, some prerequisite knowledge was required in order to follow along with the worked example.  This was the ability to use MS Excel.  In the readings, we learned of the Pretraining Principle.  This principle states that learners should be given pretraining for concepts required later in the course.  This principle was also used in the screencast to describe some necessary vocabulary for understanding of the worked example.

In the screencast, I tried to give the students ample opportunities to test their knowledge.  I tried to chunk the information into smaller parts and included examples of the correct answers so as to boost learning.

Below is my screencast.

The software used in the screencast were PowerPoint, MS Excel and Camtasia. Although this was my first attempt at a screencast, I learned that Camtasia is an exceptional tool for the development of this type of presentation.  I definitely should have used this program in the making of my digital story.

I learned so much during this project.  It was so fun exploring new ways to teach.  Not only did I review many of the multimedia principles learned in the class, I developed my first screencast, and, at the same time, had a chance to reacquaint myself with Camtasia and PowerPoint.  The learning and teaching advantages to screencasting are endless and will definitely be a part of my teaching practice as I move forward.