Mon 9 Oct 2006
Far and away the most common form of computer education is the show-and-tell. The ‘teacher’ gets onto the computer of the ’student’ and says click here, type this, drag this while the teacher actually does these actions. It’s great to do it this way as it can be done ad-hoc and it is done in context on the student’s computer. It is not so great in that the teacher will only do one show-and-tell, it will be as short as possible and the teacher will not be there in a week when half the new learning has been forgotten.
Camtasia from techsmith is a software product that addresses these problems. It will record what is on screen as a movie you can play back in Windows Media Player. If you have a microphone you can record the commentary. That way you can record your show-and-tell once and copy it to many of your students. They in turn can play the movie time after time if they require.
We have been using Camtasia in house for many years as an in-house training tool. It is time for our customers to start using it as well I think.