Maths Screencasts - Good Practice
Preparation
Whether you use preprepared slides or whether you handwrite the content live, good preparation will save you time in retakes.
- Use colours and highlights to indicate terms etc rather than using the mouse cursor
- Indicate linked terms by colour or circling with an adjoining line
- If prepaparing typed slides use overlays so that not too much ppears at each stage
While making the screencast
The reason for leaving the gaps below is to make editing out the glitch simpler.
- Dont forget the Pause button
- If you make a slip of the tongue, pause, take a breath, restart, leave a gap and then say what you intended
- If you make a slip of the pen, pause, delete, take a breath, restart, and leave a gap
- Try and say anything that you write down as this will ensure students have time to read it
Editing
You can resolve minor problems by suitable editing.
- Remove the glitches that occurred during recording
- Check that is runs reasonably smoothly
- Top and tail with an introductory and acknowledgement slide
- Use call-outs for highlighting or even managing errata - for example you can use a call-out such as `Of course x should be y here'
- Remove zooming unless you want it
- Note that the default audio is optimised for a male voice so you may wish to change that
Accessibility
Although screencasts are most useful for students who have no probelms with either seeing or hearing you can help with these issues to some extent
- Always produce a document to accompany the screencast, a full transcript is not necessarily the best option./li>
- Adding subtitles as call-outs works well (where there is room)
Other links
The following website, aimed at people making podcasts, gives further useful tips:
Good practice for podcasting