The eHive: Screencasting & Podcasting

What is 'Screencasting'?

Let's suppose you have a message you want to get out to people, and you'd like to do it by recording applications and graphics on your screen, perhaps turning them into a video in variety of formats, suited to display on a range of devices. Your message might be a lecture, a briefing for students, or a video illustration of a case study.

You might also wish students to demonstrate any work they have done on computer by getting them to make a video presentation of the work. You can have them introduce their piece by having a webcam image of their face on screen, thus making it harder for them to plagiarise their work.

Screencasting Software

There are a number of tools that can be used to make screencasts, including Adobe Captivate, Wildform Flair, and a number of free tools. Probably the most capable but easy to learn screencasting packages are available from the USA company TechSmith.

For capturing screenshots, as either images, or short five minute videos in either FLV or MPEG 4 format, TechSmith Jing offers benefits, including being able to upload those captures to your free Screencast.com account, and then to provide anyone with a short URL to that content. The URL can be added directly to a Twitter tweet, onto your wall in Facebook, straight into your account on YouTube, or into Flickr, as appropriate to the content type.

For the creation of scripted briefings for students, that can be edited and enhanced through the use of a variety of built in tools, Camtasia Studio (or Camtasia for Mac) offer(s) some great facilities. Users can record on-screen elements and webcam video, save it all as a video (a 'camrec' file), and then edit it. Video, audio, callouts, zooms and pans and more can be added during the edit, and then the video produced out to MPEG 4, Flash, Quicktime, Real Player, or Camtasia Relay. Recordings can be made for computers, iPhones, iPads and many more devices. Camtasia really does enable academics to achieve great results quickly.

Camtasia Relay, a client server based software application, permits similar video recordings to be made of lectures as they are delivered, and for the content to be automatically encoded and placed on disk storage. A link to the content is sent from the server to the author, who can then send it to anyone who he/she wishes to see it. It is also possible for this email to create an announcement in VLE's like Blackboard Learn and Moodle, if the appropriate powerlink is added.

Availability of Screencasting Software in PBS

Firstly, any of the applications above can be tried for 30 days by accessing the 'Downloads' page at TechSmith. The trials are fully functional, and give you ample time to see how good they are. To add a trial to your PC in PBS, book a job with servicedesk on X3265 to have the trial added to your PC. If you are using your own PC, then it is very easy to download and install a trial.

The TechSmith installed software base in PBS includes:

100 licenses of Camtasia Studio 6 (due for upgrade to Version 7 during summer 2010) in the Richmond Building, labs RB1.03, RB1.04, RB1.05, and RB1.08;
20 licenses of Camtasia Studio 5 or 6 in use by academic staff.
A further 20 licenses of Camtasia Studio 7 to be distributed this summer.
Jing installed on all Richmond and Burnaby Terrace PCs (both open area and academic).
Camtasia Relay recorder installed on all PBS academic and lecture theatre podium PCs.
Camtasia Server installed in a UoP Server Room able to process 7 concurrent recording streams.

Further requests for Camtasia Studio licenses will be examined on a case by case basis.

What about Podcasting?

Podcasts, (or audio recordings), can be produced in a variety of ways.

Source Forge Audacity can create WAV or MP3 files (when used with the LAME plug in). Audacity and LAME are available on staff and students PCs in PBS.

Camtasia Studio can recorded audio podcasts, as can Camtasia Relay if the appropriate profile is requested by the user. Both can produce either a WAV or MP3 file, the latter at radio or reduced quality, to suit available bandwidth of the user's system.

A range of microphones and headsets are available for booking from the Richmond Building IT Helpdesk, including USB podcasting microphones and both monoaural and stereo headsets.

The eTeam can also assist academics to use two audio recorders that can be used in conjunction with a radio microphone to capture speeches and presentations in high quality.

Further Information on TechSmith Screencasting Products

The links below allow further information on TechSmith's screencasting software products to be obtained. Note that TechSmith also maintains a 'Learning Centre' for each product, where a series of how to demos on using those products can be found.