For this assignment, I decided to make a mini tutorial for a time line tool that a colleague built for our courseware product. For reasons of copyright and permissions, I could not show in my screencast the URL for the tool.

 

Description of learning/instructional goal:

The instructional goal for this activity is a cognitive goal that requires the student to competently use a software.

 

Students will be able:

• to use a simple software tool to create visually appealing and time lines.

 

Single objective tied to goal:

Having compiled relevant dated events and matching visuals, the student will be able to effectively use the Interactive Time Line Builder provided within the lesson framework to make a visually appealing and accurate time line of said events.

 

I used a Word doc and a 2-column table to list my script and what I expected to see on screen as I spoke or worked. Writing out the script and researching to gather some events and images was actually the easy part for this assignment. I prepared my storyboard and optimized all the images that I planned to use and then ran several practice runs with screencastomatic before I was finally satisfied.

 

My greatest challenge was the tool itself, actually. It is new and a bit flooky. I will be giving feedback for improvements to my colleague. So, for purposes of completing my assignment, I needed to avoid the quirks I had run into with the software. At one point, I had a few different videos that I thought I might be able to manipulate in Movie Maker to make a finished product. But I found that screencastomatic videos do not work well in Movie Maker and the images ended up blurred. So, I just had to make use of the pause feature efficiently and make it from beginning to end.