Screencasting - best practices

While I certainly do not consider myself an expert on screencasting, there are a few suggestions I would make to individuals with no prior experience.  These include:

• Make sure the house is completely quiet or you've locked yourself in a quiet room!  
• Relax ... pretend you are speaking to someone and don't expect to get rid of all the "um's"
• Minimize or close any excess windows.
• Make sure the mouse is working properly so you can point out the fields on the screen.
• Try and remember to rename the screencast so you can keep track of which one is which.  If you are like me and find yourself recasting, you could forget which is the best of the group.
• Generally, using a microphone will help your audio presentation, but the one I used did not so try to have a microphone available.