screencast – Kent Matsueda

How to Make a Perfect Screencast

I have a hard time making concise and direct screencasts while being as time efficient as possible.

I have recorded a screencast on how I make screencasts.

Basically, I make a screen recording without audio first, then I record the audio, and finally I edit them together into a final cut that plays back smoothly and much better than if I just hit record and do everything at once. All I use is iMovie and Quicktime Player on the Mac. Both are available for free.

While this takes a little longer, it is much less frustrating and higher quality than trying to record both my audio and the screen at the same time.

Rockin’ with Rocketbook

I’ve just started using a Rocketbook Everlast Mini, Rocketbook Beacons, and the required iOS app. I’m not into product reviews, but wanted to make a post because I can already see how these products will definitely be part of my work productivity, especially the Beacons.

Rocketbook Everlast Mini with a black cover, a Pilot Frixion pen, and a folded microfiber wipe I chose the Mini mostly for personal use and used my own money to buy one. I didn’t want to spend a lot and thought the smaller form factor would be fine and perhaps suit my needs even better. So far, I’m happy.

Mini Pros

∞ use? seems durable, but there appears to be minor etching on the page surface, not sure that will make a difference
encourages creativity: when the ink is your only consumable, I feel much more free to write down any little thought or sketch
cleans easily with only water: it’s not really a pain to have to wipe down each page, it’s actually cathartic in a weird way
back to analog! I’m always typing on a keyboard it seems and it’s nice to get back to pen on “paper”
there are other pen types in the Frixion line of pens, not just limited to the “ball point pen” experience of the pen that came with the Mini

Mini Cons

“odd” writing feel, no pencil-like experience
ink drying is longer than expected: they claim you need up to 15 seconds, but I’ve noticed it can take up to over a minute depending upon how much ink you’re using – when I’m sketching, I’m using much more ink than when I’m writing
no edge bleeds: it makes scanning more difficult
weather sensitive? not sure, but it doesn’t take much moisture to smudge the ink; scan your work often if you don’t want to lose your work

The Rocketbook Beacons are an interesting idea. Basically, these four stickers allow you to capture or broadcast any whiteboard space. Of course your need a smartphone running their app, but the app seems to work very well and is easy to use. I used to use my whiteboard all the time to brainstorm ideas or processes, but capturing them was always an issue. I used to use an app called CamScan, but saw an article saying I should avoid that app. Anyhow, Beacons definitely inspire me to pick up the whiteboard markers again!

Rocketbook App

Nice design
Free Rocketbook pages which you can print out, a feature that puzzles me since the whole mission of Rocketbook is to reduce the amount of paper we use
Flexible Destinations feature, but I don’t have access to store things in my various O365 Teams, I have to upload it to my OneDrive folder and then move it to a team location
Share with anyone is possible, but you have to make an extra click to access the “Share” option
Auto-rotation often does not rotate pages correctly – I thought it just used the QR code to determine orientation, but that is not the case; you can use the app to rotate the pages, but the QR code remains on the scan
No way to combine separate files into a single file without the use of 3rd party software

Using GIFs of Screencasts

I’ve just started up a new Sway to document my efforts to find a balance between text and video screencasts when trying to help others with computer questions.
Click the image above to view a sample GIF. Unfortunately, this site does not natively display animated GIFs stored in the associated media libraries.

Progress on the Decision Tool for the Instructional Use of Video website

I have been serving on a sub-committee to develop an online tool that will hopefully help faculty when they’ve made a decision to use video in their courses.

April Millet is the chair, and we’re joined by Ryan Wetzel, Victoria Raish, John Buckwalter, and Peter Warren.

In our last few meetings, we’ve been hammering away at the Formidable Forms plug-in for WordPress. We’re trying to squeeze our required functionality out of the tool and we think we have a solution. I have to give a huge shout out to Ryan who was behind the keyboard and lead a lot of the detailed tinkering of the code.

I spent this morning deconstructing the code again and worked to establish a process. I was successful and even worked on some formatting things that were bugging me. I took everything I learned and blasted out a working draft of the tool on our website.

I’ve documented my work thus far in five screencasts that have been posted to my YouTube channel. I still have more work to capture there, but it’s a good start.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve proven that it can be done and all we need to do is fine-tune our content and delivery and we should be very close to delivery.

Using VoiceThread

Dr. Chu stopped by my office with a question about opensource options for recording lectures that he may want to share with his students while he is traveling.

I sat down with him at my computer and walked through how to use VoiceThread. I had the foresight to record the session (22 min 06 sec) in case he would like to refer to it for future use.

I cover the following topics:

creating / uploading content
commenting / recording
sharing
editing existing VoiceThreads
uploading video content
commenting on video content

There are some excellent guides online with more information at https://voicethread.com/howto/category/web-application/.

I would also like to mention best practices when preparing to record. I have created an Evernote with a section on recording best practices.

Where’s my site?

A couple of days ago, I went to return to my blog to post something about participating in Jake’s ADG back in August, when to my surprise, I had lost access to my site! It looked like it was deleted 🙁

The support team at CampusPress quickly restored my with a brief explanation, “This looks like a strange cache issue that shouldn’t happen again.” Well, I hope not.

They are actually still looking into the problem because I cannot view the site from my list of sites. I’ve recorded a screencast of the problem: https://youtu.be/mahzuW5qYos. Hopefully, they will be able to fix the problem quickly.

This raises a couple of new questions.

What is my backup strategy? I don’t have one now, but you can bet that I’m going to look into how I can export my site and save archives of it if possible. WordPress is capable of that.
Are there any other missing sites? I can’t seem to find any missing sites, but I might just be forgetting something.

UPDATE! I just realized that my site was listed there, but with the same title as the “main” sites.psu.edu site. So, what I thought was a duplicate before is actually my site. I have to see if I can rename the listing so that it stands out differently, but it looks like things might be OK.

Screencast: Publishing/activating Qualtrics Surveys

One of the great resources here at Penn State is Qualtrics. Qualtrics is a robust, third-party surveying tool. Qualtrics is unparalleled in the number of features it offers. If you can’t do it in Qualtrics, I don’t think there’s another freely available tool here at Penn State that could do what you’re looking for.

I just recorded a relatively short screencast video on how to publish and activate a new survey. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback on the process.

Moving Canvas Video Assets to Box.psu.edu

I’ve finally begun a project with our multimedia specialists to move our video content in Canvas to Box.psu.edu. We have a few courses that include downloadable video files as stored assets within Canvas. We were still working out our workflow at the time, and we decided that we need to do something better that our default.

Some of our students are commuting and prefer to have videos on their devices so that they can watch the content while on-the-go. By using Box.psu.edu, we have unlimited amount of storage to put our video assets for students. Box provides revisioning, access from various platforms, syncing to the cloud, collaboration, and more. We’re currently using College resources to store live and working documents and while that’s been great in the past, we’re enjoying new functionality with Box.

I’ve created a screencast of a discussion about what an initial workflow will look like. Howard is going to start and document changes as he goes.

[Internal: see Footprints Ticket #806]