Read and review the assignment to understand my purpose and audience, and the parameters I'll be working with. Come up with an idea for who I might analyze (Mike Bloomerg?). Participate in online discussion with colleagues in which we clarify some of these things.
After online discussion, re-evaluate my choice of who to analyze, and decide to crowd-source my focus for this assignment to my students.
Aminah and Huda put together the above list for me, and I take their advice. Lisa Koshy it is!
I waste spend 4 hours immersing myself in all things Lisa Koshy. I had never heard of her before starting this assignment, so I've got a lot of catching up to do.
I narrow the final texts I'm going to analyze down to three, and ultimately decide on her "Why I Took a Break" video, since it touches on some of the troubling themes I've been thinking about in this class.
I watch the video so many times that I catch myself singing Lizzo's "Good as Hell" in the grocery store. I reread the chapter from Create to Learn to re-orient myself with some themes I can connect the video to.
I sketch out an outline of the points I want to make, and decide that I'll use Google Slides to structure my screencast. I go back and forth from inserting videos and text boxes into the Slides presentation, and developing my script. I painstakingly go through each slide with a video and change the start and end times so that each clip matches up with the content I want to talk about.
I practice my script with my presentation, and notice that the videos are taking a long time to load during the presentation. I download the videos using a (probably illegal, definitely sketchy) website, and then upload them to see if this helps.
It doesn't.
I then spend the next 6 hours playing around with both Screencastify and Screencast-O-Matic, and get increasingly frustrated. I begin stress-eating cereal. I reach out to my classmates through the Notion and Pathwright. My dog hides from me because between all the Lizzo and all the crying, he's also feeling on edge.
I call it a night, sleep, and get up the next morning to have another go at it. The same problems with the video quality continue. After my 13th attempt filming this thing goes awry, I email Renee out of desperation.
I decide to follow the advice of Anna Rothschild in How to Build a Creative Style Online, and give myself permission to not be perfect. I give up on including video clips, and redo my Google Slide presentation with screen shots and caption bubbles. Three tries later, I have an end result that is NOT perfect (what's up with the green pixelation?), but it gets the job done.
I swear off screencasting for the rest of my life. I take my dog for a walk, and the fresh air and exercise help me feel not quite "good as hell" but more optimistic than I had been feeling 20 minutes earlier. I might consider using screencasting again, just not screencasting that includes videos.