Why

Screencasting is a technique where the screen is recorded with an added audio channel.  There are a number of reasons to use it in an educational setting I can think of:

• Record lectures to use as pre-session learning in a flipped learning style
• Mark students formative work as a screencast, look at their word document or similar and ‘ink’ onto the screen as you talk them through how they did
• Walk students through a tricky software problem, i.e. howto submit an assignment.

Here’s an example from Khan academy which I think works really well

How

The how I’ve covered in a recent post, my favoured tool (for non-techies) is office mix, an add-on to powerpoint (another howto tutorial).  I have recently found out that it doesn’t work on the Mac version of PowerPoint (Microsoft, please get a grip) and of course, you may not use PowerPoint.  If this is the case I have had good experiences of Screencast-o-matic with whatever the presentation software is that you want to use.