Screen Cast

Sometimes when I have met with parents to discuss their child's progress they have said to my that their son or daughter has sometimes expressed a lack of understanding in how to answer the different questions they have to complete in their Religious Studies lessons. This is a completely understandable issue. I have been thinking recently about the concept of flipped learning. By this the learning is done at home in preparation for the lesson and in the lesson instead of doing the teaching you are able to do fun and creative activities in order to demonstrate what has been understood.

I am a little daunted by trying this out, but in my reading one thing which struck me was the importance given to videos as a means through which information could be shared with the class. I have already written about how much I love that here. I thought therefore that it might be sensible to create some videos explaining the different answering structures we use and how they could be deployed. Encouragingly in one of my lessons I said to a class I had made one, and one of the boys in there said he had already watched it. Result. I plan to make some more for each of the different questions so that in homework time I can encourage the classes to watch over the videos as a reminder of what they should be doing.

To do this I used a tool called Screen Cast O-Matic. It's terribly simple; just open it up, pull the recording area to the right amount of your screen and hit record. You can even record a voiceover of you awkwardly explaining something. I am the Queen of Awkward so this of course was right up my alley.