I developed a screencast by capturing the action on a computer screen while narrating voice instruction to create an instructional tutorial. This particular application is quite useful in my profession and I expect to be utilizing this tool often. 


I created a screencast with Camtasia to introduce students to the use of the Compass Learning online curriculum. In my first attempt, I combined the screen capture with voice narrative in real time and made several mistakes which needed to be edited out of the video. In the process, I found the final product to be too choppy, so I went back to my old tried-and-true method of creating an audio recording of the narrative first and combining it with the screen capture. That way, I was able to focus on one element at a time and could listen to the soundtrack while creating the screen capture video. The combined recording required very little editing and was a much cleaner production. I played around with a few of the special effects, like the zoom and pan features, which didn't really work with this particular video, but I did use a cursor effect to make the cursor more visible throughout the presentation. In uploading my project to YouTube, I was required to add a watermark to the screen which I find very distracting. It rendered this screencast unusable for my intended purposes but creating it was certainly a great learning experience. Camtasia is a full-featured product and I was quite impressed with its functionality, although it did take some getting used to at first. I plan to try other screencasting applications for comparison sake because I can see myself creating several screencasts in the future.  Please view this presentation in full-screen mode and feel free to leave a comment on YouTube by clicking on the link below.   

Comment on YouTube