Mozuku

Here is a playlist with two videos featuring a lot of gestures.  Please watch the videos and be ready to talk about the role of gestures.

Many years ago I paid about $20 for a nice little software program called SnagIt by a small company called Techsmith. It did only one thing but it did it very well—it allowed me to take pictures of part or all of my computer screen and save them as files. Over the years, I have used that program countless times, especially when making instruction sheets for my learners. A year and a half ago I got reacquainted with (a now much bigger) Techsmith when I saw another one of their products, Camtasia, being used in a demonstration. Russell Stannard was using Camtasia to capture videos of himself correcting students’ writing on his computer screen that he would then send to the learners. It was a brilliant idea for feedback, but it took time, the file sizes were rather large, and the software was costly.

Recently, there are several screen capture solutions for still images, video, and audio available on the web and this month I’d like to introduce some of them. First is CamStudio (downloading needed). CamStudio allows you to record all screen and audio activity on your computer. You create AVI files which you then convert to SWF (Flash video) files and place them where you want, on your school server, for example. The most obvious use of this is for “How-to” videos for your learners. Instead of the old printed sheets with dark and almost unintelligible images taken from your screen, you create a short video introducing how to do something your learners need to do with the computer. You can have the video of you doing it and you can add an audio explanation too.

Next is Jing, a new addition to the TechSmith family of products. It also needs to be downloaded and does much the same thing as CamStudio, but it saves your video on a remote server (like YouTube) and sends you the link for embedding into your blog or website. This is a very user-friendly tool indeed. Here is a video demonstrating how to use it. The video was made with Jing.

Keeping track of your training videos can be a little difficult if you have them embeded here and there in different blogs and websites. But the web can help with that, too. Veewow is a site that allows you to create playlists for embeddable videos. You can keep all your training videos in one list and other videos you use with groups of learners in other playlists. With some institutions recently blocking YouTube, Veewow can be an accessible alternative.

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