Easy Online Tools for Visual Teaching

For many educators, the use of multi-media is a regular function in the classroom.

I went to an excellent workshop hosted by Carolyn Guertin from the eCreative Lab @ UTA about Moving Teaching Online: Screencasting.  This is one of many in their digital workshop series they offer.  It was  a great (free) workshop for faculty & staff to gain more knowledge about slide & screen casting to best support educational practices.

The wealth of media resources available online is overwhelming.  If your objective is to enhance instruction and learning, here are a few tools I use, and a couple new ones I have just begun to play with:

• Screen Capture tools
  • SnagIt – screen grab tool for Window users; purchase required (test out the 30-day trial version)
  • Grab – a tool included in Mac computers to get screen shots/images
  • Jing – great for screen capture for image or video for any platform, able to do voice-overs & it’s FREE!
• Slide Casting
  • SlideShare – online community forum to share slides (& audio) with students and others; able to match audio recording with slide content easily [I use this website the most.]
  • MyPlick
  • Sliderocket
• Slides
  • MS PowerPoint
  • Impress by OpenOffice
  • Google Docs or Zoho – great free online tools, but will often have to convert presentations to PPT format for slide casting
  • Keynote – need to convert to PPT format to use on slideshare
• Audio
  • Audacity – get a solid microphone with headset & start recording and editing tracks for your presentation
  • PodcastPeople – record your audio & get a link to an mp3; downside: there is no post-production editing feature
  • GarageBand – Mac users can get this free application to record & edit audio tracks
• Screen Casting
  • Camtasia Studio – record, edit & share on screen activity; costs $
  • Camstudio – FREE streaming video software for screen capture
  • Captivate by Adobe – for those who are serious about their online learning and visual screen capture; purchase required (pricey even with education discounts, but worth it if used often)
  • Windows Media Maker – able to create videos for the screen cast; not part of the new Vista package (down grade OS)
  • Snapz Pro X – high quality imaging; able to use video, images and save the in a smaller format; time lapse editing,  audio voice-over and great editing options
  • iShowU – records audio & video; tagline = “when words aren’t enough”
• Video Content Storage Online
  • YouTube EDU – YouTube videos posted for learning; great for archiving teaching material for your students
  • CaptionTube – new feature from YouTube that allows for adding captions via a sophisticated video caption editor – this means that the  text transcription sits beside the video
  • Recommendation:  use institutional web portal or closed site if you are using any copyrighted material or content

Have fun!