I hate Lecture

Last week I started my physics class with Relativity in Week One (pdf). A short unit by E.R. Huggins. I really like this unit, but it is totally contrary to how I usually teach as I had to lecture the whole week. This year I have four sections of Physics, in the past I've only had three. That extra section makes a big difference. My experience from last week reinforces my plans to not lecture in class this year.

So, this year I will be lecturing on video and students will be able to watch on their own time. This will leave more time in school for working problems. Basically, those tasks that may have been homework in the past will now be class work. So, when a student gets stuck they can ask me for help rather than just copying off a classmate. In addition, this may allow me to sneak in a few more labs.

The videos can be streamed from the web from either Blip.tv or the archive.org. They can also be downloaded via iTunes and played on home computers or portable media players. If needed, I will burn a small number of DVDs of my videos for students who might not have a computer at home.

So far I've been using TipCam to do screen captures and as needed I also use a small Wacom tablet I bought on ebay to write on the screen. I'll be listing all the videos on my FLOSScience site as I create them. Feel free to use them with your own classes or just use them as a source of inspiration.

In an effort to keep my life easy, my goal is to do my videos in one take. Basically, this means they will likely be a little rough at times. Below is the first part of my lecture from chapter 2 of our text book (modeling one dimensional uniform motion).

TeacherTechBites Episode 003 - TipCam for Screencasting

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Many people are put off by the idea of creating screencasts. Most think it takes expensive software that is hard to use. Today I'm showing the program I use in Windows called TipCam. It's totally free, you can download it from http://www.utipu.com/

By default it recods in flv format. What's this mean? Most video sharing sites convert uploaded videos into a flash video (flv) format for streaming on the internet.

Cool functions include:

• The ability to zoom in on your video to higlight some point (although it doesn't look zoomed while recording)
• A pen tool for drawing on the screen while recording
• You can upload to YouTube directly from TipCam
• TipCam includes a flv player, so if you download any videos from YouTube (future episode) you can play them with TipCam

Now that said, there are not a lot of user configurable settings. If you like easy to use software then this is a good thing. If you're a serious power user then you might not like this program.

I've only really had one problem with TipCam so far and that was it would not record the screen in one program (Phun) I was playing with. So I had to use Snag-It instead.