Information Technology Writer

Commercial Demos – I am not sure if this is the first or the most common use of screencasts but certainly it is a major use and one of the reasons why screencasting became so popular. Commercial demos are intended to show to the target audience what a marvel a given piece of software or a site is. I bet that this is the most expensive type of screencasts because when it is part of the sales and marketing campaign of a given company, the quality of the pictures has to be outstanding and very often the audio narration is recorded in a studio by professional actors, rather by the user himself.
Tutorials and HOWTOs – tutorials and HOWTOs are an essential use of screencasting – it looks that screencasting is invented just to make it possible to show in a couple of actions rather than in paragraphs of text how to perform a given task. And the possibility to add audio narration to explain exactly what is happening on screen makes it the perfect tool when you have to repeat a given lecture or a course many times, addressing audiences of hundreds and thousands of people. It is obvious that for e-learning and distance learning screencasting is a really valuable technology.
Instructional Movies – while tutorials and HOWTOs are generally short (from 5 minutes to half an hour) and concentrate on a particular task only, technology does not limit the size of a screencasts and it could be a full-length movie. But there are some specifics of long screencasts – they must be made into logical smaller parts, otherwise the audience will hardly have the patience to see it at once from start to end. The advantage of full-length instructional movies over tutorials is that in the movie you can include everything in a logical sequence, while the tutorials (even if you number them as Part 1, Part 2, etc.) generally examine only one topic.
Software Reviews – I don't think that anybody will dispute the advantage of a screencast over a textual description only, when reviews are concerned. It is so much easy to communicate an idea, when you can show the stuff you are reviewing.
Reporting Bugs – although this stuff is not abundant on the Net, screencasting to record and report bugs is a really valuable tool. As my experience shows, bugs are tricky in two aspects – there are bugs that occur only occasionally and under specific circumstances and therefore are not always easy to reproduce and sometimes, even the bug is reproducable but it is hard to fix, developers just find it easier to deny its existence than to fix it. But when one can present a movie with exactly what is happening, then it is visible what is wrong and if there is a will, there is a way to fix it.

Screencasting and Education

As seen from the classification above, two of the major uses of screencasting are directly related to education – tutorials and HOWTOs and instructional movies. Since a screencast is relatively simple to make and does not require significant resource and knowledge, it is not surprising that the Net is full with educational screencasts on most diverse topics – from teaching beginners how to perform basic operations in office packages, to explaining the intricacies of complex technologies. Although screencasting has not yet replaced human teachers, it can be of valuable help for self-learners and in e-learning because it gives the chance to view the movie at leisure at home and play it as many times as necessary to fully understand the concept or to memorize particular steps.

As I said, on the Net there are screencasts about almost any topic and technology one can think of. Among the links to sites with educational screencasts, I can name http://myscreencast.com/forums/ as one place where there are many screencasts divided into categories (concepts/ideas, software development, web stuff, Mac, Windows, Linux software, etc.) plus a section to request a screencast about a particular piece of software. Another site with general resources (although it seems that they are more Mac oriented) is http://www.screencastsonline.com/ . An excellent place for Excel beginners is http://www.schooldatatutorials.org. A place with more technical screencasts (actually targeted mainly to development with Microsoft products) is http://channel9.msdn.com/. The links I quote are just to give you an idea about what is available on the Net and the list of interesting sites with screencasts can be endless and a simple search in Google is likely to lead you to the stuff you want but if you still cannot find the screencast you are looking for, why don't you make it yourself?