Camtasia

I have been using Camtasia for about 3 years. The program is like a video cam that records everything you do on your computer screen and then coverts it to a video file that can be played on any computer. Perhaps you are demonstrating to your class how to use tables in Word to align the text of a multicolumn document. You have your computer connected to an overhead projector and the students are watching as you show them step by step how to insert a table then make the borders disappear so everything is lined up nice and neat. You mouse click a button at the bottom of your screen and Camtasia starts recording your screen. When you are finished you click again on the button and Camtasia saves everything you have done to an AVI file. It then puts the entire AVI file on an editing screen and you can edit it. You can narrate over it, annotate it, cut out parts and even insert an interactive self grading quiz at the end. When you are finished you simply select produce and everything is saved to a file as AVI or Flash (to have the self grading quiz you need to save it as Flash). The final file can be put on DVD or CD. Next time you want to have this lesson you just play the video and the students see everything you did the first time plus the annotations and narration. You can copy it on each workstation or your network. Over the year, if you have a lot of lessons like this Camtasia can create a table of contents. Camtasia will automatically convert a powerpoint to AVI. (I don't think Camtasia is on the DOL approved list so you will need to take this home to use it or put it on a non DOL laptop or figure out something else. I have only one CD and do not want to send it to DOL for six months and wait for approval). It is a little pricey at around $350 for education but worth it. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Playing Catchup

Do you feel you are behind the learning curve. You know the terms but aren't exactly sure what they mean. The following are links to short three minute videos that explain in easy to understand terms technologies that are shaping the current generation.

blogs http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs
RSS http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
Twitter http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter
Wikis http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

Do you know of other links to help us play catch up? Post them as a comment.

Experimenting with Technology in the Classroom

How great would it be if we had a complete multimedia tutorial system that covered all of the items in our TARs. Some people are visual learners and need video and animation, others need to read content and still others need to hear a lesson. With all students interaction seems to be a key factor in learning. A complete multimedia tutorial system could provide all of that.

The following are some experiments towards that ends. You will need flash to view most of it but it should already be running on most computers. The Percent and PosNeg are simply powerpoints that were converted to flash files using a program called Camtasia.

http://www.californialanguagecenter.com/UN/Exercise.swf

http://www.californialanguagecenter.com/Percent.swf

http://www.californialanguagecenter.com/PosNeg.swf