The screencast recording software is free and inter grated with the site. Simply record, review if you want, and upload. The screencast will be hosted, for free, on freescreencast.com and can be embedded into another site or blog via the provided embed code.

You can also save it as a .FLV or download the .FLV from the site at any time.

There are no time limits.

Full disclosure: I’m the founder and primary developer of freescreencast.com and the software. I’d love to hear any feedback you might have.

Jason

As far as I know, it doesn’t have password protection, but it creates URLs that are not really guessable. Good old security by obscurity.

The only real complaint I have with Jing at this point is that each recording has a five-minute limit.

Upload the video file to the course’s files directory, or a subdirectory within this. Open the course’s files directory, and from this copy the URL of the video; you can do this directly from the activity, or can open a second tab or window in the browser to view the file directory for the course (if doing several for the same course, save the path up to the filename, and just append the filename; which could be just the name of the student, saved e.g. in the “wk1feedback” subdirectory w/in the course directory).

If I have a mess of small videos to upload, or a single one that exceeds my PHP upload limit, I’ll find the proper directory (by course ID#) in the moodledata directory in root, and FTP them en masse, rather than uploading them one-by-one using the Moodle file upload interface.

You can also upload your video files elsewhere (e.g. FTP them en masse to a directory outside of your Moodle installation), and link their URLs in the same manner.

In any Moodle activity - web page, teacher feedback on assignment, whatever - wherever you find a text editor - enter some text content (perhaps just “_”), select this, and create a link; pasting in the URL of the video (or mp3 audio file). It will now stream in the activity using Moodle’s built-in flash player. Works great. I do mp3’s, quicktime movies, & .flv movies like this. The .flv’s are much smaller, so are my favored format.

The trick to getting it to stream via the multimedia filter, is to *link* to the video file, rather than embed it directly in the page.

As a recent convert to WordPress (http://lisaneal.wordpress.com/), I have ideas about how to use it for a student project, but I wish I had these insights a few months ago when I could have tried it with my students.

I read a lot about sharing of course content but less about sharing of teaching techniques and technologies. Am I not looking in the right places?

I’m experimenting with Screencast.com now, and so far it looks good.

http://www.utipu.com/app/

Hope it helps.

http://www.jingproject.com/

I’ve used it for quick sceen recordings, including audio narration. It’s not as full-featured as their product Camtasia (which I use also), but it may get the job done. Most importantly, they provide free hosting for registered Jing users on screencast.com. According to their site:

“Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which we are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.”

More importantly, though, I don’t want to have my wife have to teach students to use two separate LMS’s. She’s obliged to use the one provided by her school already; I was really looking for a mechanism where all they would do is get an email and follow a link where they could view a video in-browser. If they have to learn how to use the assignments tool, create and manage another course login, etc., I’m afraid it will be too heavy.

Set up a Moodle installation - I use OnSmart for hosting.
Assignments can be uploaded in whatever format (.doc &c.) using the Upload Assignment activity, and the instructor can open & read these directly. Be sure that you’ve configured the installation and the course settings to permit upload of files of suitable size, and that your PHP upload limit is set high enough. 20mb files should be OK so long as you set these appropriately. 10 minutes in .flv format should run ~10-12mb.

Create the screencast in the screen resolution of your final product - this is the trick for legibility. I use iShowU on the Mac for screen capture, and convert to .flv using On2 Flix standard (Camtasia on PC works fine, & can export directly to .flv format). & be sure to enable the multimedia filter for .flv files.

.flv format is the ticket for small files - these will be *far* smaller than the same file in Quicktime or windows media formats. And more universally readable cross-platform.

Return the feedback, by inserting the video into the instructor feedback on the assignment (as a link to the video file inserted in the text field) - can only be accessed by instructor and the intended student. The student can then view this when returning to the assignment link to see grade & feedback Studuents will be sent an automated email when you’ve graded the assignment.

If you don’t like the default screen resolution for video set in Moodle, open the filter file (filter/mediaplugin/filter.php), find the .flv section, and adjust the display dimensions there.