What's A Camtasia??

There are many technological tools available to us that can make us more productive in our work and personal lives.  One of the tools that I find useful both in my work life as well as in my personal life is Camtasia, available from TechSmith.  Camtasia is an excellent tool that will allow you to record the information from your computer screen, as well as add sound, additional video, and do editing to your final product.  My first involvement with Camtasia came when I was putting together compliance educational presentations during my time as a compliance officer.  Many staff were unable to attend presentations in person but are required to receive their mandatory annual education.  By providing pre-recorded educational sessions recorded via Camtasia, I was able to allow staff to take the sessions posted on the institutions Intranet at their leisure, and then simply take a short quiz and submit in order to receive credit for the training. 

I enjoyed using the product and began using it for personal reasons as well, such as building movies for family occasions. It is always fun to embarrass your teenage children with movies of them at birthdays and holidays, and this is a great way to do so!

I eventually began using Camtasia in my teaching as well, as I was teaching online through a Blackboard based system and found it to have a few more features and be a bit more user friendly for building ‘lecture’ videos than Blackboard Elluminate.   You can build videos and upload to YouTube, edit with various animation and video effects, and even build in quizzes and surveys directly into your video (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-pc-mac-comparison.html). 

These are obviously great upsides of Camtasia, and there are many.  The biggest downside is the cost.  It is $99, so it is not a ‘cheap’ option, although with the education discount it does bring the price down to $75.  They do also offer a free trial in order to allow people to try it out and see if it works for them.  If you are only doing short videos and only need a true screen recorder, Jing is another program produced by Techsmith that does the job quite well and is available for free.  The maximum length of a Jing video is five minutes, so anything longer than that would require a different product.

I like to use other tools in conjunction with Camtasia, particularly Prezi.  I will often use Prezi presentations on my screen, which I will then ‘narrate’ for my students to create a lecture type format.  Prezi can provide a great alternative to Powerpoint, which can become dry and mundane after a while.  Prezi is new and exciting for students, and can help to liven things up a bit.  I also like to mix in Ted videos as well, perhaps including ‘snippets’ or links to important videos for students. 

Web 2.0 has created an entirely new world of connectivity – two way communication between all of us.  These tools can help us to get our messages our effectively.