How to use MoveNote for screencasting

Embed yourself in your video lesson

MoveNote lets you create screencasts where you appear alongside the material, making how to screencast a lot more dynamic for students and educators. Flipped classroom? Blended learning? Student presentations? Gallery walks? Support for students with disabilities?

Let’s look at some of the possibilities, features and how to get up and running with Movenote.

What’s Movenote?

Movenote is a screencasting tool that lets you add your voice and image to slide-based content. It’s available as an online service accessible from your laptop, as well as a Chrome extension, and free iOS and Android app versions. There’s also a Movenote Chrome extension that lets you make Movenotes directly from your Gmail. If you sign into the app with your Google account, all your Google loveliness can be slurped directly and seamlessly into the app.

What can you do with it?

Educator Matt Yoskowitz made the above Movenote screencast to provide students with an introduction to and expectations for the first level in his online ecology unit. The instructions cover not just background material, but how the unit functions as a digital badging experiment.

App-smash! Movenote + VideoNotes = video-based assessment

Social studies educator Joe Rivers is app-smashing Movenote with VideoNotes to create video-based assessment for screencasts:

The goal is to use Movenote to have the students become teachers and record the various concepts we’re trying to master under the topic of economics…our hope is to have students use VideoNot.es to view one another’s Movenotes and stop and start the presentations enough to gather the information presented and then turn that info gathered using VideoNot.es to put together a summary of the topics presented…. Sebastian’s was our first shot at it and we’re trying to reflect upon performances and information shared to get better.

Here’s Sebastian’s MoveNote:

How to get started using Movenote:

On your laptop:

1. Go to Movenote.com/site/intro and click the Continue button. Allow Movenote to access your camera.
2. Upload some slides you’d like to record next to, in .jpg format, or as a .pdf or PowerPoint file type. Movenote has Google Drive integration, so you can use it with Google Presentations fairly easily.
3. Hit the red button to begin recording. There are also controls for pausing your video or just starting over entirely when your cat walks across the keyboard. Good stuff!
4. You can also record and upload a video separately (for instance if your content focuses on the outdoors and you want to really POINT TO THE TREE while talking about pointing to trees).

On your iPad:

1. Open up the app. Allow Movenote to access your microphone and camera.
2. Add slides from the Camera Roll, take photos as you go, or import them from an app.
3. Tap the red button in the middle of the blank square and start recording.

Note: there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn the camera off and record only audio for slides in the iOS version. Has anyone found a way around this? You also do need to create an account to save your recordings; if you’re not signed in, when you go to embed your Movenote in a blog post you’ll find it’s mysteriously disappeared. ASK ME HOW I KNOW THIS.

But other than that…

You can also leave video or text replies on a Movenote with the handy Reply button, thus enabling a whole conversation to take place entirely in video. Huzzah!

Ideas for using Movenote:

• This educator in Australia is using Movenote to teach finger-signing
• Being able to see the face of the person giving instructions can help with comprehension in some types of language processing disorders.
• For students with severe social shyness, this would be a great tool for recording presentations for educators in a stress-free environment.
• Record student-powered Movenotes for gallery walks, for families to enjoy during open houses.
• An educator in Massachusetts has been recording her entire lessons in Movenote.

How could you use Movenote with your students?

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