Name: Rebecca DeLozier

School: Lewisville High School

District: Lewisville Independent School District

State: Texas

Subject: AP Biology and Physics

Rebecca DeLozier has been flipping her AP Biology and Physics classes for several years. She has some basic advice for teachers new to creating screencasts:

1. Start Small, with a single concept or a quick compare and contrast.
2. Take your time writing out what you want it to look like, then replay the slide.

Rebecca says that the hardest thing about screencasting is the planning stage, developing a specific outline that has everything she wants to include in the video.

“It doesn’t all have to be written out explicitly first, but I do need a point-by-point list of all the examples, experiments and terms I want to discuss,” she says. “The goal is always to reduce the content down to a six- to seven-minute video.”

In future Freedom to Teach blog posts, we’ll explore Rebecca’s methods for creating AP Biology and Physics screencasts in depth. She uses different approaches for each subject.

“After I have a content list I park myself on the couch with my iPad and a stylus, and start writing and drawing out the lesson,” she says. “This includes a lot of revising on the fly, which is why I love the Doceri Timeline!”

Rebecca says the videos aren’t perfect, but neither are lectures in class. She never starts over from scratch when she stumbles or makes a mistake, she just pauses the recording in Doceri and starts again from that point.

“When I first started screencasting I would spend hours on a video,” she says. “Now, if the lesson is written in Doceri I can record, edit, and have five published in under two hours.”

Rebecca’s advice dovetails right into our philosophy – Just Start.