My history with screencasting has been a frustrating one. A couple years ago I really wanted to have accompanying screencasts archived to the library page that went over the skills we taught in classes. Obviously students can't remember everything you've just talked about when they are still reeling from the reality of having a large scale project (my dialogue: "The importance of keywords in database searching cannot be overstated..."/simultaneous student thoughts: "How many pages is this paper? Eleven? I don't even read eleven pages in one sitting, how am I going to....").
But I was doomed. I paid for a well-reviewed screencast software and then couldn't get it to be large enough that I could use the image (kind of a problem when you are showing all the little details of a database) and I prefer to not clutter up my applications folder. Then I tried Jing, which was okay, but still suffered from a smallish display. I never felt like this would actually be helpful, and the fact that I had to upload my screencast to their website and use that as the link was kind of frustrating. I don't inherently mind it, but the website was slow to load on our school network and since almost half my student population are student boarders living on campus, this was impractical.
So when the much-appreciated Richard Byrnes, author of the Free Technology for Teachers blog (one of my favorites), presented several screencasting tools that educators could use, I thought I'd use the waning days of my summer to see if I could grab the Holy Grail and find a screencasting platform that would work well for my instruction support needs.
First up was Screencastle, which is one of a new breed of screencasting sites which needs no downloading (it uses a little Java code). There is nothing to their website - it's one page with a big start button and a series of boxes showing you all the various links and code you'll get when you're done. I pressed the button, gave Firefox permission to accept the Java script and in less than a minute, a little bar was at the bottom of my screen with a button that said "Start recording". I opened an extra window, pulled up my library page, and began a rough overview of using the library catalog, specifically my Aquabrowser overlay.
When I was finished, I just pressed the "stop recording" button. A "Preview this Screencast" button appeared on the bar now, as well as a "Save this Screencast". I previewed it (nice and big, yay!) and while I thought I sounded a little faint, I checked my systems preferences and discovered my mic setting was at the middle point, so that's my fault, not Screencastle's. Smooth audio and nice clear image and I was super happy. It took no time at all (versus the hours of staying up until 2 am frustrated with my Jing screencast) and as soon as I hit "Save" I got the above embed code and/or a links to previews or a full screencast. You obviously would have to copy all this down for yourself since with no user registration, it would be hard to retrieve it from Screencastle.
The other screencasting tool recommended was Screenr. Designed as a screencast tool to be used with Twitter, you actually sign in with your Twitter account (so you are registered, versus Screencastle's no registration policy). The site is pretty with more support to make a newer screencaster feel comfortable. Your finished screencast is iPhone and YouTube compatible and you're prompted at the end to enter your tweet (with less than the 140 character maximum because Screenr saves room for it's abbreviated url for your screencast). There is a five minute limit on recording, but that would be fine for most information literacy skills, particularly because we often break them down into chunks anyway during instruction.
After signing in with my Twitter account (handle: SassyLibr), I loaded the screen recorder (I had an error the first time, but the second time it loaded like that *snap*). A ghost frame pops up which you can stretch to cover exactly what you want to show on your screencast, or you can use the window presets available down in the dropdown menu of the screencasting bar which is in the lower left corner of your computer. This bar is nicer than the Screencastle one in that it shows a coundown timer (remember that 5 minute limit) and also has a sound tool so you can see how sensitive your microphone is before beginning recording. A "Done" button allows you to indicate when you're finished, but there is a pause button in case you needed to stop and open up something else before resuming recording.
I decided to focus on Noodletools for this screencast, since a couple of our lower school students were getting nervous about its annual revalidation feature and because I am so utterly psyched about the new features it's rolled out (which you can see in the screencast - I mean, Googledocs integration?? *geek fist pump*). When I finished recording, it prompted me to add my Twitter length description, but there was a check box for me to indicate that I didn't want to Tweet it right then (remember since you've got a log on for Screenr, all your screencasts are accessible in one place). The publishing time took a while - it hung up for about 6 minutes - and then I unsurprisingly got an error message. The good news is that nothing was lost; I could go back to the publishing page and try again, which I did and it published in about 3 and half minutes. I was given the option of publishing to YouTube (which I will consider since we do have a Kirby Library account and that could be a good way of reaching students) as well as the link and embed text (used above.) If you found yourself using Screenr a lot (and I think it would become a frequently used tool to demonstrate skills and sites to students and faculty), there is actually a bookmarklet that you can embed in your browser, so you can just click and start recording. Pretty convenient.
Last up is Screenjelly, also meant to be integrated with Twitter and Facebook, but a few differences exist. First, the limit here is 3 minutes (versus Screenr's 5 minutes), and that could make a difference if you're demonstrating something more complicated or with several steps. I did like that Screenjelly has a check box where you can indicate that you want your screencast to be private, so if you need to include passwords for electronic resources and don't want to have to change them (like I'll need to after my Noodletools screencast above), this could be a good option. Once again, it's just press an onscreen button and go - no software install or download necessary. Weirdly, ScreenJelly has a "Help" button on its site, but if you click on it it tells you that feature no longer exists. Not comforting.
Since I realized poking around it that ScreenJelly was owned by the same company that owns ScreenToaster, another recommended screencasting platform, I decided to use ScreenToaster since I wanted to next compare Ning with my Canvas account (also a Richard Byrnes recommendation) and it was bound to take longer than 3 minutes. No help button here either and you do register in order to archive your screencasts (you can record without registering). When I watched the demo video the audio kept cutting out, which I found disturbing, but I still plowed along. I did enable the beta version which said it was going to produce higher quality video (but that there might be problems), so please keep that in mind.
Similar to our other screencasts, you have to approve an applet to enable the program, and like Screenr, it uses a frame which you can put over what you wish to record. There is a time counter, but not an audio display, so you are unaware of your level of audio input. I recorded for a little over 7 minutes and then watched the preview. I gave up after a while, because of all the buffering, but was a little dismayed - my recording seemed to be oddly letterboxed (which makes me feel like I'm showing The Magnificent Seven on TMC, rather than a screencast) and the print looked REALLY small, which gave me shuddering Jing flashbacks. After 17 minutes of upload (and 22 indicated to go), I gave up. No screencast of this length should take that long to upload (my five minute one on Screenr took less than four minutes and was a good quality) and I had been unhappy enough with the other features that I didn't need to torture myself.
So I think the winner for me is Screenr - it was a little more featured than the others and I like the interface. I can develop the library's YouTube channel and promote that to students and link off the library page. Having ready access to an easy screencaster will also be useful for capturing computer bugs and showing our IT office so they don't have to necessarily poke around as much to try and figure out the issue, and teaching kids how to do it (perhaps under the guise of recording gaming prowess) would be a good technology literacy and writing skill (to say nothing of public speaking). I think we'd be hitting several ISTE and AASL standards with that one!
Just when I thought the first half of my YALSA Preconference was worth its weight in gold (the academic research presentation and then the author panel on using 2.0 tools), we have a snack break and I get this - an amazing brownie and cookie with free sodas and water. Hello! I didn't know we were going to get food to say nothing of kick ass food (thanks, Embassy Suites hotel). This was extremely well timed considering I had come to the preconference 2 hours early so I could get a front row seat, specifically for this part of the preconference, because I was just so totally psyched to be in the same room as John Green and David Levithan, authors of the recent book, Will Grayson, Will Graysonwhich I enjoyed tremendously!! This meant forgoing lunch and simply eating a slightly stale trail mix packet from the hotel gift shop but it was worth it to be up front. Life does play these funny little tricks on you - I was now in the position of trying to eat oh-so-ladylike my gihugic brownie (it can be a word if I want it to) and every now and then I would wedge too big a piece in my mouth, sort of choke a little and have chocolate crumbs all over my face - which of course my two heroes sitting up front could witness all to easily because I was sitting 10 feet from both of them.
Also new to me on the stalker radar was the delicate art of talking someone's picture (that's my water bottle cap in the front of the picture) so you can text it to a few of your closest teenagers so they can text-shriek, "I'M SO JEALOUS!! HOW CLOSE??!!" back to you. So I now I had chocolate crumbs and a smug expression on my face; I'm sure it was super attractive. But it turns out that despite my unbelievably high expectations of my two fave authors, they actually exceeded them. Their part of the preconference was entitled "The Future of Reading" (John Green's recent School Library Journal article had the same title) and it turns out that these two individuals were more than capable of tackling such a weighty topic.
Both authors just plunged into the topic, demonstrating a comfort with each other while showing the idea of how teens are reading is something they have both mulled over on more than one occasion. John used David's project of 39 Clues as something revolutionary in the world of reading, albeit for a slightly younger age group. For those of you without a tween in the house, 39 Clues is a multiplatform reading experience that engages readers and gamers by intertwining book reading and online gaming. Kids have to read the book to research how to play the game and players are rewarded by seeking out extra information on their own. The story is essentially no longer limited to a 200 page book, but instead presents thousands of pages of reading to young kids and they swallow it whole. It is obviously working since the site, sponsored by Scholastic, has over 1 million registered users. Both John and David emphasized that it was a false distinction to separate readers and gamers, but that's exactly what so many educators have attempted to do. The negatives are obviously that this is a very expensive project for the publisher and also demanding on authors. John Green felt that the amount of collaborative writing necessary for this project also makes people uncomfortable as so many readers enjoy buying into the romantic notion of one person writing a fabulous novel by candlelight in a basement, but if it helps kids read and is a compelling story, than obviously we should go for it!
The dynamic shifted into the two men asking each other questions (they were both excellent interviewers). David asked John to talk about his philosophy of using the web since he's done so much with his social network, Nerdfighters Made of Awesome, and his website which is home to his extremely popular video blog. Prompted by David, John spoke about how he always though his job was to intellectually engage his viewers and that video was such an accessible medium for anyone and fit his mantra, "Go Where the Readers Are." John wrote a novella "This Is Not Tom" which combines video clues online and reading in order for searchers to find the next part of the story. He said that teamwork was an absolute must to solving the story and a goal of his was to inspire collaborative problem solving. When David asked John if he was ever tempted to do a book combining video and a story since he was so facile in both mediums, John said that he wasn't, simply because he was highly satisfied with the novel as a comfortable and accessible medium for readers. Both men agreed that paper will be a continued option for some time, but that lots of other options will become available and be highly appealing for readers.
Now the format shifted into them answering audience questions. Here are my notes about the questions and their answers. Obviously I'm not a court reporter so my notes might not be totally complete but this is the gist of what they said!
Q: What do you think of fan fiction?
JG: I like it because those writers are readers and it's inherently non-monetized.
DL: And I've never met an author who had a problem with it. Publishers have occasionally had a problem, but not authors.
JG: It deepens "fandom" within that community, so there are a lot of good outcomes from it.
Q: What do you think the significance of the recent publisher ebook battle with Amazon.com versus the iBookstore from Apple?
DL: I'm going to have to sit on the fence for this one since I work for a publisher but a lot of the debate reminds me of a crazy Christmas price war on a toy everyone wants. Books aren't toothpaste.
JG: Ebooks have a lot of advantages, a big problem for publishers is the remainder system with all these books that have been printed and not sold.
DL: Publishers are really still figuring it out. Ebooks can save costs but there are other costs involved with producing them.
JG: I think we're sitting among an audience who knows the cost of getting books to kids, particularly for libraries and schools. (*smattered applause and head nodding from audience*)
Q: Do you see a time when libraries will be largely electronic?
JG: Digital divide issues will always be an issue; where does the money come from for the readers and computers kids would need for that? I think we're pretty far off before we are in that place.
Q: How do you use the internet to lure readers?
DL: Social networks are the life's blood of authors and publishers since they can energize communities prior to publication. It used to be that publishers did some promotion prior to a book but it was inherently limited. Now you can have millions of people pumped up before a book is released.
JG: I stole this technique from Lauren Conrad from The Hills who had trumped up interest in her books. (*audience laughter*) We live in a personality driven world.
Q: Are you planning on doing a spin off starring Tiny Cooper? (Note: Tiny is a very memorable character in Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
JG: (smiling) Possibly.
DL: (also smiling) There obviously a musical that needs to be written there.
Q: Do either of you envision something similar to 39 Clues for the YA market?
DL: It would be exponentially harder since the choices are infinite. 39 Clues is largely successful because of the educational buy in from educators and parents - this wouldn't be the case with a YA product.
JG: I can't emphasize enough how insanely expensive this process is. For someone with an established market - Stephenie Meyer, for example - it could work. Maybe I should call her?
Q: We are curious about how you co-write a book like Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Did you send chapters via email or use a special software?
JG: We didn't use anything more comfortable than reading the chapters over the phone to each other and occasionally a piece in email.
DL: Collaborative fiction is so much more popular now since 2.0 tools can make this easier. We didn't really use any of them, though.
If this is the future of reading, I'm buying. Thanks, guys!
I'm going to have to split my blog entries of this preconference into more than a few sections because, for one measly afternoon, the organizers packed in two days worth of information!
I sweltered through the three block walk from the Convention Center to the Embassy Suites hotel ("walking distance of Convention Center" really needs to be revised in 90 degree DC weather) arriving with a rather healthy glow. Two bottles of water and some trail mix later, I settled into a comfy chair outside the ballroom to spread my conference program and exhibit hall in order to map out my swag attack (more on this philosophy in a different entry). I was REALLY early so I got to see the committee members, headed by the ebullient Wendy Stephens from Buckthorn High School in Alabama bustle around reading everything in preparation for their many guest speakers and panelists.
The agenda itself was impressive but no more so that the quality of presenter that followed. I'm going to focus for now on the first segment which was what I like to call the "academic" portion, namely two excellent speakers focusing on the research and data we have surrounding the changing landscape of the adolescent reader and the implications this knowledge has for our targeting them for recreational reading promotion.
Dr. Eliza Dresang from the University of Washington, Seattle was the first up to speak about her theories of Radical Change, aptly explained in her 1999 book Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age. It's a credit to the quality of her theories in this book that, despite resource types and the information age evolving exponentially since its publication, her theories hold up extremely well and are as applicable as when this book originally debuted.
She highlighted three major digital age principles for Radical Change, namely the presence of interactivity (dynamic, nonlinear, non-sequential learning behavior and resources), connectivity (construction of social worlds, communities, and the expanded self-perception that comes from these associations), and finally access (which breaks the long-standing information barriers and opens up worlds to users). No librarian in the room was about to argue the existence of these three factors in the lives of the kids we serve, and I appreciated that she cited the technological futurists attempting to help us understand where our world was evolving, like Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT), author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
Dr. Dresang made a point of bringing in the significance of recent research to enhance our understanding of the far-reaching impact of her theories and how they affect our vision of "library resources". Teens are reading (duh, we knew that, didn't we?) and their brains are changing through their regular interaction with technology, which is literally shaping the areas of the brain accessed during this type of activity. They prefer "digitally designed" resources and also prefer situations that allow for the three conditions listed above - interactivity, connectivity, and access. This sounds a lot like the "what should our classrooms and teaching look like?" discussions I've had with teachers and administrators.
But she also cautions us by indicating the research which shows that teens preferences do not equate to them possessing the skills to process and dominate these technologies that they prefer. Gary Smalls, a University of California scientist has conducted brain research showing the negative effects of brain function of teens using technology and multitasking their way out of deeper understanding, much of which is summarized in his book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Other scholars, some critical of the larger benefit to be had by adolescent use of technology, include Mark Prensky, author of Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning, Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learnby Larry Rosen, and Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Dr. Dresang indicates that these authors come from various academic disciplines and, while she may be occasionally skeptical of their approach at times, they all provide valuable and important arguments for our critical understanding of teen use of technology. Collectively it seems all researchers agree that children need to be taught to use technology critically and wisely, exploiting the best it has to offer while also understanding the weaknesses it possess to true personal development.
Moral of the story? Teens are positive about technology and are attracted to the ways in which it satisfies their developmental need to develop an individualized persona while collaborating and sharing in various communities, but they lack they technology and literacy skills to fully wring the best our of information they find. Luckily for them, they have librarians to help, eh?
Following Dr. Dresang was the erudite and informative Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. She blew the crowd away with the data she presented from a few recently published studies - "Teens and Mobile Phones" and "Social Media and Young Adults" - both of which she combined to give us a comprehensive picture which she called "Teens, the Internet and Communication Technology". The reason that this data is so vital is that the Pew Foundation has been following these trends for long enough that they were able to take the collected data and compare it to 2004 data, giving us a snapshot of the various trends society has experienced over the last several years. In technology years (which are kind of like dog years), these time span is equivalent to a century and the results are fascinating to say the least.
I liked Kristen's approach, namely that the researchers wanted to take the commonly held myths about teens - all teens use the internet, every teen has a cell phone and texts all day long, teens have been supplanted by adults on social networks, teens love Twitter, and teens are active creators of content online - and really peel back the surface to see what lay underneath.
What Pew discovered (see the great slides embedded above from Kristen's presentation) was interesting. People who make sweeping generalizations about adolescent technology use are apt to forget the socioeconomic factors that make up the digital divide. While I was impressed with how many households now have access to the internet, I was reminded (and appalled) at the number of homes still laboring under dial up connections (10% of reporting households). When combined with the number of households with no computer (8%) and families with a computer but no internet connection (4%) that's a whopping 22% of American households with no access to the rich 2.0 environment preferred by teens. The trend that the Pew Foundation has conjectured is that their data shows teens from homes with low income levels use their cell phones for primary access to the internet, causing the researchers to predict that the major trend for future years will be that "all internet access for teens will be from mobile internet devices". Take a look at the data. I believe her!
. It's a credit to the quality of her theories in this book that, despite resource types and the information age evolving exponentially since its publication, her theories hold up extremely well and are as applicable as when this book originally debuted.
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. Other scholars, some critical of the larger benefit to be had by adolescent use of technology, include Mark Prensky, author of 
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