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Teaching With Web Content
Foreword
There's no need to sell you on the benefits of using the Web and its rich seemingly endless content as teaching material. But it's also common knowledge that the open Web isn't the safest place to be sending the younger kids to.

Because of that, many teachers have taken to merely printing out the material. That works. But it takes something away from the experience, particularly with interactive content.

So, what to do? This issue provides two possibilities. The first gives you a way to guide and control students through "live" sessions, and the second lets you present the Web in action. Print is good obviously, but for some material, students will likely get more from either of these free solutions.
 

Daft Doggy
http://www.daftdoggy.com
Daft Doggy is a free online service whose whole reason for being is to let you record Web browsing sessions, play it back at will, and share recorded sessions with others... with very little effort!

You don't even have to give it any URLs (save for the first one, your starting point) — DD automatically records every URL you progressively visit during the session.

Calling it a "session" record could be a bit misleading. It doesn't really record everything you do; what it does do is remember each separate URL you visit in sequence (internally within the site or externally, it doesn't matter).

Viewers of your recorded session will see a blue bar across the top of the page that shows the URL of the page displayed; on the right of the bar are Reverse and Next buttons that will let the viewer follow you along through your session, visiting every URL you visited, in sequence forwards or backwards. The blue bar shows and stays in place throughout the whole session playback.

Here, take a look at this example I put together in less than 5 minutes:

http://www.daftdoggy.com/play.php?r=288

Note that for each session recording, you'll be given a unique link like the above... very easy to distribute!

You can edit your session recordings to a limited degree. You can't add or delete URLs, but you can edit existing ones. You can also give any URL entry a description, comment and/or — nice touch! — record a voice comment.

I'd say that at this point the service has minimal frills, but it sure can come in handy for quick and dirty guides, tutorials, presentations. And, of course, student projects!

Go to Daft Doggy
 

CamStudio
http://camstudio.org
Although not designed specifically for capturing and recording a Web session, a lot of folks use CamStudio to do just that!

CamStudio can record everything you see (and hear) on your screen while performing a task (such as working with software or — ta da! — Web browsing) and save it to an AVI video file. It also has a built-in feature that can convert your captured AVIs to Adobe Flash SWF format, often preferred for vidclips that need to be accessed online because of its much smaller filesizes.

(AVIs can get pretty huge, even the brief ones. Not a problem for offline use, but online that's a killer. To illustrate this, I created a short CamStudio-generated vidclip that shows nothing but a single Google Toolbar search sequence. Total AVI filesize? Almost 16MB! Here it is. That's just the nature of the video beast.)

This is a very powerful tool, quite frankly, and there is a very slight learning curve. But it sure is worth it! A lot of software publishers use it to create tutorials, which is how I got wind of it in the first place. Imagine my amazement at finding out that it costs us absolutely nothing to get and use!

Get CamStudio