07 May 2009

Thing 38: Screencasting

I tried Screentoaster and I think that I made a screencast but when I went to watch it, it didn't go over so well. I let it buffer for 15 minutes before I gave up on teh lack of progress. I am not sure if I actually made a screencast, it was a very confusing site and I pressed the record a screencast button but then I was not really sure what to do. I opened a new internet file to mess around and show something but then when I went back to the Screentoast screen on my computer, it wasn't recording. It did say that I had 45 secs of recorded information but I was not able to see it do to the buffering to figure out what it was. I watched the Jing tutorial but choose not to download it. We have been having issues at our library with downloads and other things that have had viruses attached to them so I didn't want to risk it. I also took a look at Skitch and its tutorial, but it was waaay too girly for me and I was getting a bit annoyed at the continuous misspelled words so I didn't watch the whole thing. I took at look at what SELCO has done with screencasts and was very impressed. I think that this a great tool for the library and wouls be very helpful for patrons to see how to do things without being embarrassed to ask their questions or feel stupid. One of the databases that we provide at our library, NetLibrary would benefit a lot from this tool. If we were able to put a tutorial on our website on how to use NetLibrary, I think that a lot more people would use that service and be comfortable with it.

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