The Distant Librarian

Camtasia Studio 8.4 & Camtasia for Mac 2.8 Now Available: Cross-platform Screen Recording

To be honest, I kind of assumed they already talked to each other, but I guess the ability to record on one OS and edit on another is just new today. Camtasia Studio 8.4 & Camtasia for Mac 2.8 Now Available: Cross-platform Screen Recording. 

We’ve updated our screen recording file format, so you can pass screen recordings freely between Camtasia Studio and Camtasia for Mac. Using a single file format enables you to send a recording from one platform to the other effortlessly, including all the meta data, such as cursor effects and smart focus.

We hope users see the new .trec file format from TechSmith as an indication of our commitment to the cross-platform user experience.

Five Best Desktop Microphones

I've long maintained that one very important, yet often overlooked component of good screencasting is a good microphone. My current rig is the Samson CO1U, but it didn't even make the list of Lifehacker's list of contenders for Five Best Desktop Microphones. Check 'em out, and if you're in the market, pick one up - your listeners will thank you!

Related articles

How to Choose the Best Microphone for Your PC

Who does screencasting help the most?

An interesting report on the Casting Out Nines Blog (part of the Chronicle of Higher Education Blog Network): Who does screencasting help the most? The author summarizes the results of a Winter 2011 paper in Advances in Engineering Education (PDF), and concludes that,

I think it suggests that screencasts, when done well and deployed properly, help all students – they certainly don’t hurt – and they help most thise (sic) students who need the most help. The analogies to mathematics courses are clear. In any math course there will be a large contingent of students whose backgrounds aren’t congruous with the course: students whose prior math background is weak to rusty, students from non-STEM disciplines, and so on. For those students, if they use the screencasts, then they may be likely to improve at a surprisingly fast rate. 

Not earth-shattering, but encouraging. Keep on screencasting!

Get Camtasia 2 for Mac for 50% off!

Just a quick heads-up that StackSocial is currently running a $50 Mac software bundle that includes the latest version of Camtasia, which normally sells for $99. In addition to that fine screencasting tool, you also get 8 other pieces of software you may find useful. Regardless, 50% off if you've been thinking about picking up Camtasia... Deal ends May 20th.

APLEN Training Centre

Here's a site you might want to browse through: The APLEN Training Centre.

APLEN is the Alberta Public Library Electronic Network, and the Training Centre is "a hub for libraries to share their training materials, learn from the collective experience of library staff, and discuss Alberta library training." There are quite a few guides from which to take inspiration. Offered with a Creative Commons license, this makes a good companion to the Librarian Design Share site I mentioned earlier this month...

Yay for sharing!

Google Advanced Power Searching course

Following a link from Lifehacker, I went ahead and signed up for the Advanced Power Searching course taught by Google. Guess I should go ahead and work my way through the archive of the Power Searching course that's still available online...

The Advanced course begins Jan 23, 2013 and includes the following challenges:

• Challenge 1 - Mimicking presidential voices
• Challenge 2 - Turtle fossils
• Challenge 3 - Festival challenge
• Challenge 4 - Humongous fungus
• Challenge 5 - Salman Khan
• Challenge 6 - Scrapbook enthusiast
• Challenge 7 - Mystery music
• Challenge 8 - Climate graph
• Challenge 9 - Name that notebook
• Challenge 10 - Who done it?
• Challenge 11 - Feather identification
• Challenge 12 - Where in the world?

According to my confirmation email, 

Course materials will be released in two batches:

• Challenges 1-6 and Assignment 1: Wednesday, January 23
• Challenges 7-12 and Assignment 2: Wednesday, January 30

In order to pass the course and earn your certificate, you must submit and evaluate two assignments and complete a final search challenge by the deadline of 11:59 p.m. PT on Friday, February 8, 2013.

Yay MOOCs!

ChronoZoom is like Prezi on steroids

Just ran across ChronoZoom this AM, which immediately reminded me of Prezi in the way things zoom around. It does look pretty cool, but so far appears to only contain content produced by the beta participants. While this makes sense as a beta, I really hope they open it up to contributions from a wider community.

ChronoZoom is an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information. This project has been funded and supported by Microsoft Research Connections in collaboration with University California at Berkeley and Moscow State University.

I also don't like that you can't link to a specific piece of content, but a really good illustration of the timeline feature is if you take a peek at the World War II Tour:

You can view use the project on your iPad, which is cool. Here's a nice video introduction:

 

Finishing the year with some screencasting resources

The Nov 2012 issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a couple of nice articles looking at screencasting, specifically how they can be used to enhance the "flipped classroom". Both are by Michael F. Ruffini, an Associate Professor of Educational Technology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Screencasting to Engage Learning is the one that ties the concept into the flipped classroom, and Creating a PowerPoint Screencast Using Camtasia Studio provides a nice walkthrough for the novice screencaster. While this one would work well as a printout to follow along, I found it slightly ironic there wasn't a screencast of his process. Maybe I just missed it though...

Finally, as a library-related bonus, Chad Boeninger had a brief piece in the Nov 2012 issue of Elsevier's Library Connect, Tips for creating and sharing instructional videos.

 

Posted with Blogsy

How to make library instructional (or other educational) videos and screencasts

Chad Boeninger continues to make good use of both screencasting and traditional video in introducing research topics to his business students at Ohio University. In this post Chad "discusses the inexpensive equipment and software needed, and shows how to make a video from start to finish. Discusses camera selection, how to use Screencast-o-matic.com, how to edit the video in Windows Live Moviemaker, and how to upload to YouTube."

 

Nice work Chad, and nice to see you! 

Change to Google Scholar Advanced Search

Thanks to a thread on the Web4Lib list I just learned that Google Scholar has changed the way you get to the Advanced Search options.

Instead of looking for a link, you'll now hit the down arrow at the right side of the search box:

At that point you'll see the advanced search options:

New Book: Screencasting for Libraries

Greg Notess, one of the first to see the possibilities of screencasting in libraries, has just announced that his new book, Screencasting for Libraries, part of the excellent ALA Tech Set series, has now been published. I had a chance to review this title a couple of months ago and found it an excellent guide for those getting started, and it also includes some good tools and suggestions for the seasoned screencaster. 

There's a companion website that provides a couple of useful tools, but I found the section where Greg covers chapter 5, Implementation, fascinating. In chapter 5 Greg walks you through 12 different projects, using several different approaches and tools. In the companion website, you can actually see the end result of each of those projects - a wonderful (and obvious, for this subject) was to complete the learning loop.

Go check it out!

11 tools for creating digital magazines

Can't remember how I came across this one, but over at NetMagazine you'll find a great post sharing 10 tools you can use to create professional-looking digital magazines, and most without any significant cost at all! Each entry lists the pros and cons of each tool, and links to a working example you can check out. The 11th tool in my title refers to the author's own startup, woop.ie, which is only a link at the end of the article.

 

Some big changes from Techsmith

Two big announcements from Techsmith last week. First Jing Pro is being retired. Looks like the free version will stick around, but in order to use the more advanced features offered by Pro you'll have to switch over to the latest version of Snagit, which now records video. The folks who've taken the time to comment don't seem pleased with the decision to retire Jing Pro, so we'll see what the next year brings; maybe Techsmith will reconsider.

The second piece of news was alluded to above: there's a new version of Snagit out for both Windows and Mac, and it sports a host of new features, including greatly-enhanced video recording. From the Techsmith blog post:

What's new in Snagit?

• Video Capture (Windows and Mac)
  
• Video Outputs to Camtasia Studio, Screencast.com, YouTube, FTP, Facebook and Twitter (Windows and Mac)
  
• Image Outputs to Facebook, Twitter and Evernote (Windows and Mac)
  
• New Stamps (Windows and Mac)
  
• Paste from Clipboard (Windows and Mac)
  
• Centered Canvas (Windows)
  
• Updated, time saving profiles and more available to download (Windows)
  
• Easier Resizing (Windows)
  
• More Zoom Options (Windows)
  
• Spell Check (Windows)
  
• Change Canvas Color (Mac)
  
• Color Filters (Mac)
  
• Webcam Image Capture (Mac)
  

And here's a bit that I had forgotten: a single license is good across both platforms! Oh yeah, AND most of you can probably pick it up for 40% off with the educational discount.

I use Snagit every day on my Windows machine, but almost never on my MacBook, opting instead for Skitch. I'll certainly give Snagit another go on the Mac though...

 

The definitive guide to iOS screencasting

Well wouldn't you know it - just days after my last post lamenting the lack of options for capturing screencasts, a new tool called Reflector has been released that allows the iPad2 and iPhone4S to stream to any Mac running OSX Lion (pretty much just like airplay on AppleTV). It's $15 for a single-user license.

Over on Digital Inspiration, Amit does a nice job of wrapping up all your options to date, including examples of content produced via each method.

Stay tuned for some library-related iOS screencasts!

The state of screencasting on iOS devices

With more and more apps coming out that can support your library's resources (Ebrary, BookMyne, EBSCOHost, WorldCat, and possibly something from your library, to name a few), wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily record some screencasts of the app in action on your device?

Well, unless you jailbreak your iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), at this time you're not able use an app to record a screencast of what's happening on your device. On one hand that makes sense in that it would require one app to be running on top of another (or the rest of the OS, really) in order to record it. On the other hand, the fact that newer iOS devices offer "mirroring", the ability to display the entire device to an AppleTV, shows that it's technically possible for a whole-device screencasting application to work. Over the past few weeks there have been a few posts discussing what you currently CAN do for screencasting on your iOS device, so I thought I'd round them up here.

First up, a Profhacker post from The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the apps Educreations and Explain Everything. I have a copy of Explain Everything and plan to review it here soon.

The Screening Room, Screenflow's blog, has the best post on this topic, with links to other posts that prove you CAN do this by outputting to a desktop machine, but it's gonna cost you a fair amount of money.

I had posted earlier about some similar hoops you can jump through using some different technology.

Finally, if you want to use your iPad to learn more about Camtasia Studio (on your Windows or OSX machine), Amit points out that Techsmith has released an iPad app called Fast Track that consists of a series of tutorials for that product.

How are things in the Android world, anyone know?