e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: screencasting

  • Jing Rocks!

    Thanks to my wonderful readers, I have solved my screencasting dilemma. To begin with, I am thoroughly impressed with TechSmith’s Jing. It is extremely simple to use and produces very high-quality videos with very small file sizes. And it’s free. It’s not what you need if you’re going to want to edit the files, create interactive training, or add other bells and whistles, but it’s perfect if you want to do a simple screencast easily and well. My sole complaint about it is that it’s just a little sluggish on the four-year-old Dell laptop. (We haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. Did I mention that it’s cross-platform?)

    Jing can save files to anywhere, but we’ve decided to use its built-in one-click integration with Screencast.com. You get 200 MB of free storage with Jing, which probably isn’t enough for Kathy’s course, but it’s enough to get started. After that, the next step up is $6.95/month for 25GB. Seven bucks a month is a little more than we wanted to pay, but it’s well worth it for the ease-of-use and the peace of mind knowing that Techsmith (the company that created Camtasia) is running it. Basically, Kathy will create a private folder for each student. It should be very simple. The files play in Flash, so there should be minimal technological barriers, and the text comes across crystal clear. This obviously isn’t a particularly accessible solution but, since this is all one-on-one feedback, Kathy can make other accommodations for individual disabled students. And if she wanted to store other files in there for students (e.g., audio, or even a Word or PDF document), her account would handle that too. It’s not limited to Flash video.

    There are a couple of annoyances. For example, Jing only saves to the “Jing” folder in her Screencast.com account, so she’ll have to go into the web interface and move each file over to the students’ private folders after uploading. That significantly reduces the value of the one-click integration. Also, the web interface for Screencast.com is a bit clunky; common tasks take more clicks than they should. And finally, it would be nice to enable email subscriptions on folders so that people could be notified when new files are added. But these are all relatively minor. Overall, I’m convinced that this will work well.

    I’ll keep you posted as the semester progresses.

  • Screencasting Frustrations

    I’m trying to help my wife with what should be an easy-to-meet technology challenge, but so far I’ve run into a lot of unforeseen problems. Basically, she wants to do screencasts of her reviews of essays for her composition students in an online class. In other words, she talks while looking at (and pointing to, and working on) the student’s Word document open on her screen. Then she wants to share the screencasts with individual students, i.e., one student should not be able to see the feedback on another student’s essay. Her university has very small file limits within the LMS, so she needs to find an external hosting solution, i suggested she get on a reading list of Web Hosting Hub Reviews. Still, this doesn’t seem like it should be a problem.

    Here are the basic requirements for the hosting service:

    • Free or cheap
    • Able to store a bunch of video clips (maybe as many as 80 over the course of the semester, max of 20 mb/10 minutes each)
    • User can make a clip private and share it only with specific individuals
    • Text must come out legible if the video is converted from original format
    • Must be rock-solid reliable and reasonably easy to use

    That doesn’t sound to onerous, does it? But it turns out that it is. YouTube meets all the goals except for the text problem. It turns out that, no matter how I tweak the settings during video capture and compression (resolution, codec, etc.), the text comes out blurry when YouTube converts it to Flash. Nothing I do seems to improve the text to the point where I’d feel comfortable having students look at their essays that way. The same problem basically holds for any hosting solution that converts the video to display in their own Flash player.

    The best thing would be to find a service that can display the video natively in Quicktime of Windows Media, both of which look fine. But so far, I can’t seem to find one that does that and meets all the other requirements. (Twango comes the closest, but it sounds like they are going to have some odd service outages now that Nokia has bought them, and I’m nervous about having the class depend on it.) I must have fooled around with 8 or 10 services today and can’t find one that works to my satisfaction.

    Does anybody have any suggestions?