Blended+Learning+Lab+Activity

//Thought Activity: Where will you store your screencasts?// Once you create your screencasts you'll save them off to your hard drive, flash drive, etc. -- but where will you store them online? Some good places to think about are web space provided by your school/district, buying your own webspace (can be as cheap as $4-5/mo.) or using a different paid service such as[| Screencast.com]

Top 15 Free Storage Sites - http://www.rotorblog.com/2009/02/09/top-15-free-online-file-storage-sites/

For this lab activity will go through a PowerPoint slideshow with Camtasia and use captioning, callouts, quizzing features as well as producing the slideshow for a variety of environments. If you choose not to use a slide show you can also do a screen test of how to use a tool or piece of software. If you brought your own slideshow please use that, if you've not brought your own slideshow then feel free to use the example slideshow we've provided below.


 * //Before starting this activity, please create a short sample slideshow in PowerPoint if you didn't bring one with you!//**

Record your lecture
Step 1 - Go through the process of recording your lecture (if you need help see http://camtasiaworkshop.wikispaces.com/Camtasia+7.0+Lab+Activity)

Generate captions and place those captions
Because speech to text recognition is relatively new to home computing, sometimes the speech to text engines in Camtasia or other software don't work very well without extensive training. Since we only have a few hours together today it's possible that your speech to text example won't turn out as well as you'd like it to. When this happens you'll need to use another peace of software or you'll need to write the script on your own. Depending on how you do your recordings you may already have that script written, if this is the case then you can use the import/export feature of Camtasia (see below) to get your transcript into the software.

The latest version of Camtasia Studio now offers automatic captioning of your screen recordings. While it's not 100% accurate, it will save you quite a bit of time if you spend time training your computer to transcribe your voice. Let's take a look! > - View the Captions Overview > - View the overview of Adding Captions Manually and then use the "tab" and "enter" shortcut keys to help you quickly caption your video. > - Since you haven't trained your computer to recognize your voice, your results will likely be abysmal... but don't give up! If you plan on doing a lot of captioning then a little training goes a long way. Watch the Speech to Text video to see the process, then try it on your own. > - Once you've added captions to your video you can make the video searchable when you go to produce it. View Make your Videos Searchable to learn how, then try it in your own video. - Produce your searchable video and try out the search feature to see how it works.
 * Captioning**
 * 1) **Learn the basics of captioning in Camtasia Studio**
 * 1) **Practice adding captions manually to your video**
 * 1) **Experiment with the Speech-to-Text feature**
 * 1) **Make your videos searchable**
 * 1) **Optional**: Sync captions with a pre-typed script
 * 2) **Optional**: Import/export options for third party providers

Place callouts in the appropriate places, pan and zoom as needed
Callouts and Pan/Zoom are a very important part of providing online content via screencast. They allow us to highlight information that's important to our students or users and which can occasionally you can do callouts/zooms in number of different ways.
 * Visit the tutorial page on Pan/Zoom, Callouts, PiP and other features for tutorials

Integrate a Short Quiz
Quizzing is a great way to incorporate some sort of interactivity into your screen casts and it also can serve to break up a lecture into smaller chunks (resetting a student's attention span). Use the following quiz provided as a Word document and integrate it into the lecture that you're creating. In this part of the lab activity we'll integrate a five question quiz into our presentation.

Step 1 - Download the Word document that contains the sample quiz, or produce your own Word document with quiz questions

Step 2 - Learn to Create a Quiz
 * [|Documentation: Quizzing and Survey]
 * Click the "More" tab and select "Quizzing". This will get you started creating a quiz. Notice some of the options offered under "Appearance and feedback" when we select "Customize feedback" such as "Jump to time", which allows us to send a viewer to a certain point in a video should they answer a question incorrectly.

Step Five - Produce
One of the great things about Camtasia now is that is always produces in MPEG-4 video format. This is a cross platform video format that will work on anything. This happens when we select the 'Web' option. However, when we produce this way a folder is created with the MPEG-4 video file along with a number of other files.


 * [|Documentation: Producing and Sharing Videos]
 * [|Video: Produce and Share]