As you may have read in the CC update newsletter e-mailed the other day, TechSmith, the creators of various screen capturing software, announced a grant that would award schools copies of their software for free. Both Catholic Central and West Catholic applied and were approved! Our grant includes 50 licenses each for both Camtasia Studio and Snagit as well as a 1 year subscription to Screencast.com Pro. The total for the grant is $11,000 per school. So what will this allow us to do that we can't do now?
Snagit allows the user to capture a copy of whatever is on your screen. You can capture a certain area, an entire window, or a scrolling window. Once captured, you can apply effects, arrows, text, etc. to further describe the item. You can then share this with other applications such as Office and it also auto-stores them for you. So, if you have a web page that you want to capture a certain screen of and include further explanation of you can, and then send that to Word to include with your assignment. Post the entire thing on Blackboard.
Camtasia Studio goes a few steps beyond Snagit and allows you to actually record exactly what is happening on your screen. You can create videos that demonstrate a process, an application, or an idea you want to share. You can edit your product and add text callouts, arrows, additional photos, music, etc. for a full featured video that can then be saved in several formats such as iPod, Media Player, Flash, etc. I'm sensing some training videos coming from my office!
Screencast.com allows you to upload and store your videos online. You can then invite people to view it, assign a URL, or embed it in your Blackboard course or your blog/wiki!
Would you use this in your lesson planning and creation? How would software that allows you to do these type of screen captures enhance your lessons?
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