One of the first issues that you need to consider when preparing your screencasts is what software you will use and what output file formats will be OK for you. As far as screencasting software is concerned, there is really a lot to choose from – starting from free packages (although they do not offer all the extras of commercial ones), to lite versions of professional ones, to the professional ones themselves. I am not going to delve into much detail or recommend a particular screencasting program, since your choice largely depends on your purpose and on your budget but here you can read reviews about the most popular screencasting programs.
The other issue that you need to consider before you start recording your screencasts is the output file format. Generally, choices are ShockWave Flash, standalone executable files (EXE), AVI, QuickTime, and windows media files (WMF). Flash is best if you plan to publish the screencast online, while standalone executable files and movie formats are OK mainly for Windows and Macintosh but still you need to check in advance that the file format of your choice is supported on the operating system where it will be played. One of the most helpful brief explanations of file formats I have found until now is contained in the documentation of Camtasia Studio, so if you decide to download the trial, you may want to have a look at the “Help Me Choose a File Format” section.
As I said, preparing a simple screencast is easy and to accomplish it, you will not need to reads tons of documentation. With some of the screencasting programs on the market it is really intuitive to record a screencast. But in any case, before you start recording, you need to prepare first. It might be interesting for you to see how screencasts are made. For this purpose, although this is not the typical screencast because it involves off-screen scenes as well, I recommend you to see this.
When you have done with the preparation and planning for what to include in you screencast, it is time to record it. I would like to say right away, that it will be a miracle if you manage to do it right the first time – not that I mean that it is so difficult to do it but as my experience shows, there must be some kind of scenic fever and as a result there can be a lot of chaotic actions with the mouse and uncountable “hmmms”, if the whole activity has not been rehearsed prior to recording it. Therefore, my tip is that you prepare well and don’t rely on improvisation and the same time do not get desperate if you need to record a movie a couple of times. Better, be prepared to record (or at least heavily edit) the audio narration after you have done with the screen activity. Then you will need to synchronize audio and video but for obtaining a screencast of decent quality this step is mandatory.
When you plan the screencast, there is one more thing to consider – its text. Yes, even if you do not write the text before you start recording, you need to have an idea what you will include and never forget that the text must be suitable for listening to – i.e. when one reads a piece of text, long sentences and paragraphs and complex words are not so much of a problem, but when one listens to the same text, it becomes more difficult to comprehend.
Another tip is not to make the screencast too long. Instructional movies are OK but if you explain a simple concept in the course of half an hour and you include every single irrelevant detail you can think of, you might expect that your audience will get extremely bored. A “trick” to shorten the overall time of a screencast that you must avoid at any cost is to speed the narration – it is obvious that when you talk faster it will take less time to narrate the text but for the user the tempo of your narration might be too fast to follow. For longer movies (or for movies with distinct separate parts) it is a must to include breakpoints of some kind – places where the user can stop and have a rest and then go on.
For educational screencast, one of the best things to do is to use more callouts and cursors that are easily noticeable on screen. Unfortunately, it is mainly the commercial programs that offer abundance of these extras. Another extra, that is valuable for preparing coursework are quizzes, which allow to have questions with multiple answers and to calculate score. But I dare say that only a few of the commercial programs offer this feature, so at least in the beginning you might have to do without it.