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Keep Students and Parents Updated—With Less Effort on Your Part!
Screencast.com is a great and efficient way to easily make information available to those who need it. Two of its features—MediaRoll and RSS—may sound a little more intimidating then they really are. The basic idea is that you put “stuff” (permission slips, homework assignments, etc.) in a designated place on Screencast.com. Then, anyone who cares (hopefully your students and parents) is instantly updated. It’s sort of like one-stop-shopping on their end, and hopefully this saves time and facilitates communication for everyone.
Screencast.com allows you to upload all kinds of digital media into a folder. This includes PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, videos, Word documents, and more. When documents such as PDFs are uploaded to a folder, a download link is automatically created for the people viewing your content.
The first thing you’ll need to do is sign up for an account on Screencast.com. Anyone can get a free account which provides you with 2 GB of storage and 2 GB of bandwidth per month? What does that mean? It should be more than enough to get you started. The Screencast.com Pro account gives you more space and allows you to customize the look and feel (template) of your folders.
This tutorial assumes you have content in folders on Screencast.com. For assistance, please visit the Screencast.com Help Center.
The MediaRoll: Your First and Ideal Option
If you have a blog or a class website, you should have a MediaRoll. Even if you can’t directly update your class website, once the IT person adds the initial MediaRoll, you can update the MediaRoll via Screencast.com!
So what’s a MediaRoll? Check out the example below. Here’s a live MediaRoll in action on TechSmith’s Visual Lounge Blog. (Scroll down—it’s on the right side.)
Here’s a more technical description that might come in handy if you need an IT person to set it up on the website: A MediaRoll is an embedded widget that uses an RSS feed to display the contents of a folder on your webpage or blog. Anytime you add to the folder, the MediaRoll updates. To create a MediaRoll use the Screencast.com generated code to copy and paste into your blog or webpage. All the details and how-to’s are right here.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
This solution might not be as ideal as the MediaRoll, but some number of your parents would appreciate this, and certainly college students would enjoy the ability to subscribe to your content via RSS.
If you’re not quite sure what RSS is or how it can benefit you and interested parents, we suggest typing “What is RSS?” in your favorite search engine as there are a number of good overviews out there. One unique way to learn about RSS is to search for “Commoncraft RSS”. These folks make some pretty great videos using common terms.
Here’s how RSS can help in education. You are constantly generating content that you want to get to parents. Giving students a note to take home is fraught with uncertainty. The phone is likely a last resort due to the time and challenge of connecting in real time. Email might be ok, but RSS can make it better.
The scenario goes like this:
You make a folder on Screencast.com. Maybe it’s called “Parent Notifications”. You turn on the ability for people to subscribe to the folder via RSS. Then you put something in the folder. Like a syllabus or lunch menu. Next, you tell parents about this folder. If they already use an RSS reader (There’s a ton of them, Google Reader is a popular example and Microsoft Outlook has it built-in as do many email clients now-a-days.) they can subscribe to the folder.
Once people are subscribed, they are notified via email when you update the folder. Once it’s set up, there’s no more work on your end.
To learn more about Screencast.com and RSS, please see these articles:
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