Thursday, June 30, 2011

Screencasting Difficulties

I know Im a little behind schedule, but I have been working double time trying to experience many of these different websites and programs.  I thought I would start off with something easy.  In the past, I often find the parents of my students do not understand how to use our online grade posting service.  They dont understand what everything means, and where to find the information.  Of course, to me it seems easy, but I've become quite familiar with the service.  I recorded a screencast of how to use the service, highlighting various important features, only to realize the microphone built into my laptop no longer works.  I was still satisfied with the video, so I needed to find another way to record the audio.  I ended up recording the audio on my phone as I replayed the vido, transferred it to my laptop, and figured I could find a way to mesh the two.  Not so easy.  The audio file was not supported by my pre-existing video editing software.  So, I downloaded an application to convert the file.  Once the file was converted, I tried to to mesh the two using my software, only to find that it was a piece of junk and I couldnt get the program to do what I needed.  Since, Ive downloaded Camtasia and will try again.  Here goes nothing....
Signing off.

3 comments:

  1. What a great idea for teaching parents about the electronic gradebook. I work for a school system that is willing to use technology in every aspect, but then the parents are left behind in the technological dust; I find that most of Open House is devoted to explaining to parents how to log on to look at their student's grades, when that time could be better spent highlighting what their child will be working on in the coming year AND getting to know the dynamics of the WHOLE student. I may steal this idea.
    I get very frustrated with the technology when it does not work; right now I'm struggling with the mic not working and blabberize not cooperating with my OS, so I took a step back and decided to get a clearer head. I'm ready to head back to it now, so we'll see how that goes. At this point, I'm pulling for your technological glitches to be over!

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  2. I feel your pain with the screecasting. I'm going to try and use smartboard to work through some multistep problems and then screecast them as resources.

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  3. I've been struggling myself, with Gimp, which is a image manipulation program and had hoped to put into another program to build diagrams using the images from Gimp. Once done I had hoped to do a screencast with Jing. My practice Jing went particularly well, but I have a head set mic. Have you tried one? Mine was about $35, made by Platronics and works really well.

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