Saturday, January 13, 2007

Being 2 places at one time with Camtasia

As with most technology specialists there are many times when I need to be two places at one time. I've started using Camtasia Studio to record my lessons. I capture my screen movements and voice when I teach a lesson. I save the file as an avi movie file and teachers can press play and have me with them in the lab teaching via video. The program has lots of features like mouse highlight and click highlight to help focus the viewer on the correct part of the screen. The sound quality is great. I used the built in monitor microphone of our Dell monitors and it picked up my voice and the students' voices. The teachers who used the video lesson later said that students were answering my questions as if I were actually in the room. Camtasia is easy to use and allows for lots of saving formats so you can show lessons over the web or even e-mail them. The funny thing is when people hear my voice coming from both labs and wonder how I can be two places at one time. Now you know!
You can find out more about Camtasia here: http://www.techsmith.com/