This week’s assignment took me phenomenally far out of my comfort zone, landing me in technology areas I have purposely avoided because I thought they would take too much time and effort to master.  Well, thank goodness for letting me dip my toes in the pool and then realizing I knew how to swim all along!

Instagram

I started with Instagram, and found it to be a lot of fun, plus it is easy to see the potential for using this in a classroom setting or for advertising library activities.  I didn’t find it any more difficult to set up or use than any other social media site, to be honest, but the big surprise came a few hours after setting up my account and posting my first two pictures.  I had more people following me on Instagram in a few hours than I did in months of being on Twitter.  Students have been telling me for a year now that no one (meaning teenagers) is on Facebook anymore, but my personal social media saturation point had been reached, and I didn’t want to learn yet another platform.  That standoffish attitude seems a bit silly now.  If I’m hoping to reach students and their parents/guardians, I need to be where they can see me, and this is obviously where they are more likely to be found.  Taking tips from this We are Teachers blog, I plan on using Instagram to showcase fun maker activities in the library, reading recommendations, and author visits.  I can also see collaborating with teachers to find fun ways to spice up a lesson.  For now, my Instagram only has pictures from my brief vacation earlier this week. It was fun to take my picture and put it through a little filtering magic and see what happened.

Vine

I’ve been viewing Vines since they came out, but I hadn’t considered using them in an academic setting at all until now.  Thank goodness for people who think outside the box and are willing to share their ideas!  This TeachThought post shared terrific tips and ideas for using Vine, especially for using it as a marketing tool.  While we can’t always get patrons interested in a longer video, almost anyone will take six seconds out of their day to view something.  And to be honest, who doesn’t let it loop one or two (or more) times to catch all the nuances?  This could be a terrific tool to embed quick tidbits of information or even to show students models of great projects. 

After multiple attempts to get my animals to do something cute and clever yesterday, I finally came up with an idea for a Vine of my own, and decided to show the steps to make a corner bookmark out of an old children’s book.  It was fun, and after a few minutes of trial and error, I had my first Vine posted up for the world to see.

Screencasts

The final part of this challenge made me the most nervous.  Screencasting has always sounded so difficult, and only for the serious tech types.  In my head, the teachers who use screencasts are miles ahead of the rest of us, and I assumed that the technology curve was just too steep for me.  It turns out I was wrong!  I tried out two different screencasting programs: Screencast-o-Matic and Jing. 

Screencast-o-Matic is the only screencasting program I had heard of before, and after playing around with it for a few minutes, I could see why people use it.  The directions are ridiculously easy to follow, and if you do make a mistake, it is simple enough to go back and start again.  The tutorials are easy to follow if you need assistance, and uploading my screencast to YouTube was straightforward.  I didn’t love the fact that my video appears to be a bit blurry, but I’m willing to play around and see if recording a higher resolution video will resolve that issue.  The upgrade price for this program is incredibly competitive at $15 a year, and if you see yourself using the program over several years, you can purchase three years at a time for only $29.  For student use, though, the free product is absolutely functional with one of the only noticeable restrictions being a fifteen minute limit to recordings. 

Jing was entirely new to me, but I found quite a few similarities to Screencast-o-Matic as I began to record with it.  After recording those similarities ended.  TechSmith, Jing’s parent company, has a family of products available, and you must use one of these, Screencast.com, to store your Jing videos and be able to share them.  I hate to admit it, but I got lost for a few minutes while trying to figure out how to share my video, and actually thought I had lost my work.  Fortunately, after watching a couple of tutorials, I was back in business.  Sharing the screencast wasn’t difficult, but you are only allowed to embed a link to the video; Jing doesn’t appear to allow for directly embedding the entire video.  The quality of the Jing recording is much clearer than Screencast-o-Matic, but the free product is limited to five minutes of recording.  Jing is free, but TechSmith offers other upgrade products such as Snagit for longer videos, and the education pricing for this is $29.95 a year. 

While I appreciated the clarity of the Jing video, I think my default program would be Screencast-o-Matic, especially if I were teaching students how to use the program and embed their own videos. 

Below you’ll find my Screencast-o-Matic and Jing screencasts:

 

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