When I intend to capture a full-screen video using Camtasia, I usually do three things to prepare my Windows 7 desktop: Set an appropriate screen resolution; Set the desktop background to a solid color; Set the Windows taskbar to auto-hide. First, I record in widescreen aspect ratio (16:9) since that is the standard used by YouTube, my production destination of choice.  It is also the standard for most of the computers on our campus.  Therefore I set my screen resolution to 1280 x 720, what they call 720p video.  In older versions of Camtasia, and on slower systems I have seen Camtasia throw an error...

A surprising number of faculty members at our institution own iPads.  I know, because I recently had the opportunity to present a short iPad Ed workshop which was well attended, and I asked.  As I say, a surprising number of hands went up.  Part of the workshop was what I intended to be a brief discussion of using Apple TV to wirelessly project in the classroom, but the discussion was not so brief because there was a great deal of interest in the iPad and projection technology.  Thus, this post, on the various ways to use the iPad with a classroom projector, both wired and wirelessly. In the...

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of a new edition of  Windows Essentials 2012 (formerly Windows Live Essentials 2011) that suite of installable programs designed to supplement and enhance Windows 7 and Windows 8.  Included in the package is a new version of Windows Movie Maker.  The changes are hardly radical, but they do include a few features that users have been clamoring for since the previous version of WMM (version 6) was abandoned for the radically simplified (some say ‘dumbed down’) 2011 version. A little history Windows Movie Maker version 6, intended to run on Windows...

Occasionally when the techs here are speaking with faculty, particularly in the free-form discussions that come up at our Wednesday morning “Blackboard with Cream & Sugar” sessions, the techs will mention tools we use that faculty are unaware of. Sometimes those tools can be adapted to use in the classroom, so I plan to begin highlighting some such tools on the blog under the “Tech Toolbox” name. For the first installment of Tech Toolbox, I’d like to focus on a simple Windows-based tool that can aid when doing presentations in the classroom: ZoomIt, from Microsoft....

We in the Academic Technology Resource Center (ATRC) maintain a YouTube channel as one avenue for distributing our training videos.  The videos are almost all click-here/click-there screen videos, or “screencasts,” made with TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio (a product, incidentally, that we are now licensed for across our college District for District owned computers).  A screencast, if you don’t already know, usually illustrates the computer screen with the cursor moving, windows opening and closing, and procedures being performed while the presenter narrates the procedure. ...