Resources and Suggestions for Hack Creation

Suggested Resources for Producing Your “Hack”

Produce a Screencast

Screencast Motion Effects

Most of the “non-free” screencasting tools allow you to pan and zoom on regions of your screen recording as you edit it for production, allowing you to draw attention to important features and add cursor highlights.   Another option for getting motion and highlights is to use Prezi.

Prezi (www.prezi.com) is a browser-based presentation tool that is free for educators and features rich zoom and pan motion effects.  Placing still screenshots in a Prezi and sequencing their motion with a path and frames can be another way to efficiently draw attention to the important features of your solution.  Create a free screen recording of your Prezi and you can accomplish motion effects without having to pay top dollar!

Use a Smartphone to Capture Video

The ubiquitous smartphone has put relatively high definition video recording capability at every teacher’s fingertips.  Whether you are a Mac or PC owner, you should have access to free video editing software in the form of iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, respectively.  Import video clips from your smartphone and be on your way!  While it is beyond the scope of this tip-sheet to explain how to use these editing tools, here are some links to tutorials to help you get started.

Free Video-Editing Tools

Both of these are great options if you want to mash up video, screencast segments, still images and screen-captures, use title slides, or insert text callouts.  If you prefer, you can also record a voice narrative over a sequence of still slides or screenshots in either these programs, sidestepping the need for a screencasting app.

• iMovie (Mac only)
• Windows Live Movie Maker

Audio Tips

When recording your screencast, the internal microphone on most laptops can produce satisfactory, though not excellent results.  If possible, you should try to use a USB headset or table-top microphone.  Run a quick test to check audio levels.  Too low and your average laptop speakers will render your screencast impossible to understand.  Too high and you may get clipping and distortion: annoying to the listener.

Be Aware of Student Privacy Concerns
Certain limitations and best-practices for respecting student privacy follow from federal and state law, and are typically found in school district policies.   In general, the following two rules of thumb should be sufficient:

• Unless you have signed parental consent to release them publicly, examples of student work should have names blurred out or removed.
• Unless you have signed parental consent (such as via a blanket media waver), video footage of students should not be used.
• Any screencasts or screenshots of documents that are official records (grades, etc) should be avoided or have names blurred out.