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
- 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!
