Now you can verify that your students are really doing and understanding the lab work - using simple free software!

You have a great lab. It teaches your students step by step how to perform a complex task. A lot of work went into creating your lab. It is a great tool.

You distribute the lab. You ask if anyone has questions. No one does. Everyone gets to work quietly. A few minutes later you ask if anyone has any questions. No one does. Everyone is staring intently at the computer screen, tapping away.

If you could watch everyone's screen simultaneously, you'd see that plenty of students are completely lost. Some are even surfing the web, checking email. At the end of the lab everyone says they did it, and they understood it, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, especially at test time.

Strange behaviour? Absolutely, but I've observed it every time I've taught a hands-on course. These are courses people are paying to attend. They really want to learn. But when they get stuck, many students won't ask a question. Mabye they're thinking that they need to go back and learn something they missed. Maybe they think they can figure it out if they just keep clicking randomly, maybe somehow that will get them to the end of the lab. Or maybe they think they do understand it, but if you were watching what they were doing, you'd know that they didn't.

There are some simple solutions to this.

You can teach each student individually. This is a great solution if your students have piles of money to burn.

You can use screencast software to capture a video of each student's lab work. Let's see, 50 students, a 90 minute lab, that's 75 hours of video for you to review. No problem, after all, what are weekends for?

Or, you could use Screenbook Maker.

When you use Screenbook Maker you are asking your students to provide a screenshot that matches each step of your lab. Screenbook Maker prompts your students with each lab step in succession. Your students perform the step, and push a button on the Screenbook Maker floating window. Screenbook Maker captures the screen, appends the text, and makes one page in an ebook. When the lab is finished, you have a complete ebook (in web format) documenting exactly what the student did at each step. You can upload the finished ebook to the web, or convert it to CHM or PDF. (PDF output is only available with the Pro version of Screenbook Maker, not the free version).

Of course, you have to spend some time checking that the screenshots match up with the text... or not. Post everything to the web and tell the students to check their own and each other's work! 

Download this free software now. Too busy? Assign it to your students for homework! You can even have your students collaborate in creating labs, which you can then reuse with other classes.

You can do all this with the free version of Screenbook Maker. Screenbook Maker is not trialware or demoware, it is a completely functional, powerful (though easy-to-use) program.

And if you try and it works as well for you as it does for us, think about contacting us for information on how to integrate Screenbooks with your existing CMS/CLS or with ours.

We should probably mention here too that there is a pay version of the program (Screenbook Maker Pro) which has a few advantages. Besides PDF output and a few other nifty features, Screenbook Maker Pro allows you to automatically put a label on every screenshot. You can have your students put their name on their screenshots just in case they might be tempted to borrow someone else's :-).

And since we just solved your lab problems, we should probably also note that Screenbook Maker is the best way to create effective teaching materials for your lectures or your class website. Check out the Screenbook Library for some great examples.