In this series, instructional design guru Connie Malamed discusses a few innovative approaches to taking learning on the web to appeal to different learning styles—Screenr for visual learners, podcasts for auditory learners and wikis for those who prefer text. In this first interview in the series of three, we discuss Screenr.
What, exactly, is Screenr?
Screenr is Articulate’s screencasting service that has a lot of potential for online learning. It screams Web 2.0 because it’s good for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and for creating user-generated content.
With Screenr, you can quickly record your computer screen and voice as you walk through how to use software or as a way to sketch or diagram an idea. It’s also effective in technical support environments. You can then share the recording at the Screenr site as well as on Twitter and Facebook.
Any tool that helps you get information out to an audience in an almost real-time capacity is great. There are many possible ways to use the tool. For example, you could send out short “Getting Started” tutorials to employees when new software is rolled out; during course design, you can use screencasts to collaborate about how an interaction might work; and you could use it to provide detailed step-by-step instructions with tips by expert users of a software program.
How does it work?
To make it work, click Record on the Screenr home page, adjust the frame around the area of the screen you want to record, choose a microphone and then click the Record button. To end the recording, click the Done button and add a message if you want. When you click Publish, the recording gets uploaded to the Screenr site.
The result is a decent video capture that you can download as an .mp4 file, share on Twitter or Facebook, publish to YouTube or get the link to embed in your own site. The screencasts even display on an iPhone.
The downside to the free version of Screenr is that publishing the screencast makes it public. This is an obstacle to all who might want to use the app for anything the world was not meant to see. But Screenr now has a Pro plan called Screenr Business. With this plan, you can embed the recorder on your site, show private screencasts and brand the player and recorder.
Please come back next week to read the second part of the interview, where we discuss podcasts.
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