I've been asked several times what I recommend as a quick
and easy way to create web compatible presentations and learning materials when
time is short.
There are a few tools I'm very fond of for this sort of
work, depending on the purpose of the finished materials. Firstly, we use Adobe
Connect Pro at Jigsaw as an online live meeting facility and, as part of that
setup, we can use Adobe Presenter and Captivate to prepare materials in
advance. Presenter is designed to take an existing Powerpoint presentation on a
Windows computer, let you record it and set the timings for each slide, and add
a voiceover in as many "takes" as you like until you're happy with
it. Once the presentation is complete, you export it as a Flash Player file, ready to
go on your VLE or web server. It's great for training and revision materials,
because the difficult stuff is all done in the familiar Powerpoint environment,
and the voice and Flash encoding part in a really simple interface.
If you're not planning to invest in the Connect Pro virtual
classroom software, you'll want something that works on its own. That's where
Adobe Captivate for Windows comes in handy. Rather than being limited to
working with Powerpoint, you can record absolutely anything you're doing on
your PC. You can use it to produce a short video explaining how to open and
start using a new piece of software, to voice over a Powerpoint, slide show or
video, and to produce interactive Flash files as well. In training
presentations, for example, you might show how to perform a task, and then have
a short test to ask students to try it for themselves, or give a quick multiple
choice test to see if they understood the task. You can program that
interactive content with Captivate, and all the student needs on their own
computer is the standard Flash Player free download (which most people already
have).
Captivate is great, but the interactivity programming makes
it more complex than Presenter, and it's not available for Mac. For producing
quick presentations on the Mac or PC, I like Camtasia. This is screen recording
software, so it's simply a case of recording the bits you want to include in
your presentation, screenshots, slide shows, voiceovers, webcam stuff if you're
brave... and then using the editing tools (very iMovie-like tools as it
happens) to put it all together. When you've finished you have lots of export
formats available to you, including some iPod presets, Flash embedding, and
even exporting to YouTube. It's surprisingly fast, and produces very polished
results.
The latest thing I've found is great fun. It's from
Techsmith, the company who make Camtasia and it's called Jing. Like Camtasia
it's available for Mac and for PC, and it comes in two versions, one of which
is free. Jing sits in a little yellow button in the corner of your screen, or
in your menu bar if you don't like screen clutter. When you've got something
you want to record, you draw a box around the section of screen you want, tell
Jing whether you want a still picture or a video recording, and hit Go. You get
a 3 2 1 countdown and recording begins. If you have a microphone you can talk
over the actions you perform, and stop recording when you've finished (maximum
is five minutes). You can then save the recording on your computer as a Flash
swf file, or export it to your free 2GB screencast.com account. If you do that
a unique URL is generated ready for you to post into an email, a browser or
instant messenger so that you can immediately share your work. The more
advanced Jing Pro costs a hundred Dollars per year and gives you vastly more
storage, webcam recording and extra export functions like export to YouTube and
MPEG.
All of these are quick ways of producing interesting podcast
content without having to invest a lot of time. Not suitable for everything, I
admit, but sometimes quick and easy is best.