2013 ASHS Annual Conference

Yes, you can turn your classroom into a recording studio and supercharge your digital presentations. Once I began putting my greenhouse management and floriculture classes online using a learning management system more than 10 years ago, I was constantly searching for a way to represent the “lecture” approach for students accessing the course asynchronously. Converting PowerPoint slides to jpeg images in sequence did not seem too effective to me and an online course needs to be more than just a set of word slides. Live screen capture software has made recording your classroom simple. There are many versions of screen capture software available and many are free. My personal choice is Camtasia that is sold by TechSmith. This and other products all record the screen well, but audio does provide some challenges. My next step was to invest in a quality professional grade microphone.  Screen capture software does not capture your laser pointer on the screen. There are many new forms of display boards that will capture what you project, but not all classrooms have that technology. And if you are an extension educator, you cannot carry that technology to your workshops in the field. There are many forms of digital tablet applications that one can use that will mirror your laptop on a tablet wirelessly. I use an application called Doceri, which allows me to generate a pointer, draw lines or highlight sections of a slide and/or switch back and forth to a whiteboard.  All the while, your computer is capturing the entire activity. That way your asynchronous audience can understand what part of the slide you are addressing without actually seeing you physically point to that part of the screen. Next, I upload the lecture video to Apple iTunesU and students can then subscribe to the feed and view the lecture on their own time. They can also download the video for use at a location without internet access. The students appreciate the opportunity to view lectures that they may have missed if they are attending class face-to-face and do take advantage of the ability to stop the video, rewind, and repeat a topic. Students where English is not their first language finds this option even more valuable.