The thought of educating others in a professional development setting is daunting. It's hard to feel like the expert in front of your peers. Even if you think you're the expert, what if it turns out that there's a secret technology whiz on your staff who is going to judge your presentation? While unlikely, there are natural fears that come with putting together a professional development presentation.
This week I chose to put together a presentation for my faculty on a couple apps and tools for visual learners. There are certainly students we will encounter who will learn better by watching a video than listening to a lecture and others who may not be great at writing but know a lot on a topic and could better show that knowledge through a video. It's not a particularly groundbreaking concept, but all four of the sites I explore in my presentation were new to me and could very well be new to the faculty at my imaginary school. I feel like the websites are also so user-friendly that they can be easily used by teachers without putting a lot of effort into learning something new with perhaps the exception of WeVideo. Even that looks pretty user-friendly, though. The teachers can dip their toes into using more technology in their classroom with these tools without having to fully dive in.
I did find that Screencast-o-matic did not work quite as well with my computer as I had hoped. I'm not totally sure of the problem, but I'm guessing my cheap Chromebook may not have the processing power to run a bunch of tabs and a recording app at the same time. There's a video I show in the presentation that does a better job of explaining what students can do with WeVideo than I could do, and each time I recorded, it caused a lag. The first recording I did started lagging almost from the start. Not ideal and no idea what happened there. Overall, using Screencast-o-matic was easy, but I do wonder if having a more powerful computer and a paid account would have fixed the rendering problems.
Here's my presentation:
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