Screen-o-mastic

Basically, Screencast-o-matic is a screen casting tool.

As an English teacher in China, my students are secondary school students, I would like to use screen-o-matic to create my own video lesson, and ask my students to watch before and after the class, so the class time can be used for more active learning activities, like discussing about the video they watched or practicing what they learned from the video.

Below is the link of the website:

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

You can either click the “start recording” button to record or you can download it on your computer.

Here is a vedio teach you how to use Screencast-o-matic to create a Powerpoint presentation for flipped classroom:

Personally, I appreciate using the video lesson in English teaching for two main reasons.

• Students can watch the video lesson before and after the class. When students watch the video alone, they can think about the concepts or memorize the vocabulary on their own and studying at their own pace. The video lesson enables students to go over the lesson over and over, they can stop it where confused them. In addition, the video lesson provides both vivid image and sound at the same time. By associating the picture with the sound, students can better remember the vocabulary and understand the concept.

• Students can make the most of the limited class time for active learning activities.The length of a typical English class in secondary high school in China is only 45 minutes, by moving the information-transmission teaching out of class, teachers can set aside more class time for student to engage in active learning activities. In active learning activities, students are required to analyze, synthesize or evaluate the knowledge they learned from the video, which result in deeper understanding and better learning outcome.

However, although screencast-o-matics is easy to use for screen recording, making a high-quality video lesson is still a time-consuming task for many teachers. Despite the time used for searching and choosing suitable materials for the video,teachers need to spend a lot of time on editing, which will definitely increase their workload.