Looking to record your lecture to place on Blackboard for further review by your students? Want to create content to accompany your lectures or even to flip your classroom? There are a variety of software solutions available to accomplish this but we will focus in this segment on lecture and screen capture. There is a wide range in this venue alone from free resources to commercial. If you have a Mac with OS X 10.6 and beyond, Quicktime Player, installed on every Mac, can do simple screen recordings with audio from a microphone. There aren’t any built in screen capture programs on Windows but there is a free web based service called Screencast-o-matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/) which does a nice job capturing your screen, audio from a microphone and then exporting to a video file or to services like YouTube. This service does limit the free version to 15 minutes.
USF also has a site license for Echo360 Personal Capture, available for both PC and Mac, which provide a simple way to record your screen, voice, and yourself via a webcam. Personal Capture also provides simple editing tools to trim video and publishes a link, which can be emailed to students or inserted into Blackboard.
Finally, there are two commercial software packages that provide an expansive set of production tools to build around the screen recording. Camtasia Studio for PC and Camtasia 2.0 for the Mac from Techsmith allow you to work with the recorded screen capture just like any movie editing software like iMovie. Titles, transitions, effects, multiple tracks are all available as well as various formats to output like Quicktime and Youtube. A final product available on the Mac is Screenflow, which has even more of an iMovie like interface and similar editing tools like Camtasia.
From the simple to the complex, there are many choices to help you create the content to bring the course materials to another level. Contact us at the CIT to learn more about the different products.