I have absolutely fallen in love with sketchcasting; it just seems the most intuitive tool ever for anyone who spends a portion of their lives giving presentations - whether to children or to adults. It's a bit hard to expain, but here is my first sketchcast to give you an idea of what it's about.

Are you as excited about this as I am? I'd love to hear some comments - pro or anti.

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Lilith, I'm still chuckling at the idea of kids from da Bronks even understanding my accent! But I guess you just meant sketchcasting in general. It's a fantastic medium for presenting concepts, with no 'production values' getting in the way. I think that is what I really love about it.

Chris, nice sketchcast! The explanation you put beside it works as a script - be nice to hear it voiced. Interesting to see that we have very similar pedagogical aims, but completely different business models.
Ian,
Oh, they'd love your accent, but more important, I think that they would be mesmerized by the sketching.

These kids are, on average, four years behind kids in suburban settings. Had I had this technology available for teaching the concept of "theme" today, I might have been more successful.

Do I need to buy a separate microphone for recording voice?

By the way, where do you teach?
Lilith, would they really? I have been having a debate with myself about whether we should re-voice our instructional videos using an American voicer - you are giving me the courage to think perhaps it's not necessary.

You can use whatever microphone there is - built-in one if it's there. I used my Skype headset. I don't think technical quality is important for Sketchcast - in fact it might even be detrimental, by distracting you from the ideas.

Where do I teach? Online, mainly. I teach teachers how to use Yacapaca - or at least I try. Teaching the technology is easy; facilitating colleagues to un-learn decades of instilled but very un-useful beliefs hard, hard, hard. Nice to see your name pop up in my Yacapaca user log btw - welcome to our community there; hope you find it useful.
The kids love it when I imitate foreign accents. I was especially surprised by their appreciation for my British imitation, so that's why I made the comment. If you'd like, I'll test your voice with them and see how they respond.
Love you to! I cannot imagine a more demanding audience than teenage New Yorkers. What would be particularly interesting would be whether they 'get' what I'm talking about. Where does the discussion go afterward? To the content of the presentation, or to the novelty of my accent?
Any tool that gets a teacher excited about a way to present information is a great tool! Just like a toolbox in a woodworking shop every tool can have many uses but finds it's real value in the person who uses it!
Wade, I like SketchCast and I'm sure I'll use it some day but how is the math example better than an overhead? Am I missing something?
Ah!! I get it now---you'd think after teaching gifted kids for 25 years I'd be a little quicker on the uptake! N
I went to sketchcast because of this blog; it's great. But how do I embed it in other places, like Twitter, or emai.

Beside any Sketchcast you make there should be an embed code.
Or you can just give the URL.

I love Sketchcast because it is so easy to use - I am slightly wary of it because it was offline for months with no explanation and all the Sketchcasts I had made just vanished (this happened to other users also). It does seem to be working well now.

I wrote a bog post on alternatives http://colleenyoung.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/online-whiteboards/.b>
Colleen:
Thank you for your reply. I tried to copy the embed code and it doesn't work. It seems long. How do I put it in a Tweet? Or can I put it on Twitter, because it seems to be too long.

What did you copy and how did you paste the example above?

BTW: I read your post.
Thanks,
Jane
Collen:
I figured it out! It is the button that says, "Menu." When it is clicked it gives you both the embed code and the URL. Thank you for your attention!
Jane

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