All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up

Obviously I was not thinking clearly during week 6 when I opined that podcasts would be a good way to release me from having to teach people how to set up email accounts. Booktalks, OK. To The Best of our Knowledge, I'm there. Talking someone through a process, not so much.

I am struck by the wide variations in quality in the screencasts I looked at. Some had a lot of annoying microphone noise, which was very distracting. The tutorial on setting up a Gmail account? Bleahhhh. If you aren't computer savvy enough to do it without a tutorial, I doubt it would help much. Some, like the University of Calgary, were just awesome. It is very apparent that having a script makes your screencast sound worlds more professional, and less like something you did in your garage or basement.

How would I use screencasts? Well, obviously, I was jumping the gun a few weeks ago with my email tutorial idea. Something I do a lot of at the desk is demoing how to search and place holds from home, as well as how to use some of our databases, especially EBSCO. Invariably I wind up showing the patron and writing down the steps on a piece of paper so they can replicate the search at home. How much better it would be for me to give them the URL and say, There's a tutorial embedded right there that will walk you through it as you're doing it, instead of handing them a scrap of paper covered in my scrawly handwriting that they will undoubtedly lose anyway. I think I would still show them while they were with me, because it goes against my nature not to demonstrate things when asked about them, but I would totally stop writing down the steps for sure.

I'm not sure if I'll get to the optional assignment or not. I'm doing pretty well to complete this assignment before we get the next one. It's nice to know how to do it, though, so that Frenzied Librarian and I can get together and whip out useful screencasts in our copious off-desk time.