We've seen some tremendous increases in engagement and learning productivity from the students where I currently teach, and a good deal of it has to do with the fact that several of our teachers have taken up the skill of screencasting and implemented it really effectively into our eLearning programs.
Of course, screencasting didn't just 'happen' out of the blue. It was something I was using in my own online courses and the learners were responding to it really well. The rest of the team became interested and I designed a series of PD sessions for them to help grasp and apply this very helpful teaching/learning tool.
To facilitate this PD, I applied something I would loosely term 'broad action mapping.' This instructional design process is based on Cathy Moore's beautifully simple Action Mapping approach, which essentially emphasizes facilitating actions instead of 'information dumping'. However, instead of being targeted at one very specific goal, the process was applied here in a broader sense for a somewhat complex goal involving a subset of goals or actions. Here's what I mean:
I heartily recommend popping over to Cathy's blog at the link above to check out her excellent slideshow demonstrating Action Mapping, and if the notion of screencasting has caught your interest you can explore it more (including demonstrations on how to use a free browser-based screencasting tool: Screenr) here.
;-D
