Screencast software for your laptop

While the screen session recording using online apps is great for quick one-offs, if you plan to produce many sessions, it may be easier to have the software installed on your laptop. Here's the best software for screencasting.

Windows 7

 

The best free one seems to be CamStudio (open source). It's got tons of features, which is either a plus if you are a tweaker, or a minus if you want something super simple.

Jing gets good reviews. Free version limits recordings to 5 minutes. Paid version is $15/year.

Wink is another well-liked app with no "catch".

Mac: Ok, gloat away. If you have MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or later, your can record using QuickTime X (quick tutorial on this)

Linux: Istanbul is the top choice here.

Updates to "Guide to apps for sketching, notes and annotating PDFs"

There have been some important updates and corrections to my Dec 2011 post on note taking apps. I've made the updates to the post, but the long and short of the updates is that Notes Plus now covers all the bases: typing, handwriting and handwriting recognition, PDF annotations and folder organization. The only missing feature is integration (import and export) with Dropbox. If you need Dropbox, this app is not for you. The cost is $5, plus $2 if you want handwriting recognition.

Great tips and tricks for common iPad tasks

Two excellent sources of tips and tricks for common iPad tasks -- worth a quick read even if you have used iPad for a while: techsupportalert.com and ipadinsight.com. 



Here's a snapshot of the current listing at techsupportalert.com:

At ipadinsight.com,  the many tips include

• uses for Home button
• taking a screenshot of what's on your iPad screen
• how to force an app to close
• how to quickly mute the iPad's volume
• sync and backup with your computer and/or iCloud
• multi-touch and multi-tasking gestures
• iPad dock
• how to remove an app
• rapid app switching
• using folders to organize your iPad apps
• how to lock the iPad screen orientation
• how to save an image from a Web page
• how to enable the Caps Lock function
• and many more

Simple graph app for iPad

If you need to enter some (x,y)-pairs data, plot them, do some curve-fitting,   and save the graph as a PDF or image, there is a nice free app that this: DataAnalysis. 

Your experience with your tablet...

I would love to hear from faculty about their experiences with the tablets. Which tablet do you have? What apps do you use and how do you like them? What do you like best about your tablet? What limitations frustrate you? Are there tasks you'd like to do on your tablet but you don't know what app to use?

The merging of the Tablet Pilot blog with this one did not preserve comments from that blog. The comments for this post are below:

3comments:

1. 
   R Olivier   Jan 16, 2012 10:39 AM

   I have found that without "full" access to the lotus notes databases, using the tablet for a large portion of my daily activities is not feasible.
   
   In addition, lack of compatibility between Blackboard and the iPad make using Blackboard (other than just reading) unproductive.
   
   However, for activities like "reading", the iPad is excellent. Also great is the email---but, I upgraded to the $0.99 Gmail App. That plus the Google Docs app mae the iPad super useful in many meetings where I would be otherwise unproductive.
   
   Lastly, the news aggregation capabilities of the iPad are awesome (such as the Flipboard App). Now, I can be up to date on News in much less time that before. Thus, in many ways, this has been a productivity boost.

2. 
   Brent A. Ferguson  Jan 16, 2012 11:09 AM

   I concur with Ramon on many points:
   
   LN runs our life here, and its incompatibility with iPad makes me still rely more on my laptop, so investing time in organizing my iPad for frequent work use seems unproductive.
   
   Reading is really a delight, especially using a machine that has a larger screen (compared to a phone) but that is lighter and quicker (compared to my laptop, including boot-up times, etc.).
   
   I downloaded Flipbook right away, but my most elusive commodity is still time. I need to spend some worktime fiddling/learning so that I can implement the apps for the sake of efficiency and convenience. I have not yet found myself able to allocate time for that during the workweek. Perhaps if I wrote a little less frequently, I could frame out time to read/learn.
   
   An alternative might be to spend 'non-work' time (aka vacation) fiddling...

3. 
   jim jordan Jan 16, 2012 03:47 PM

   I read both of the above comments and agree as to the Lotus Notes issue. I do use my iPad preferentially for email and for other reading.... also I have been using the iPad iPhone combination successfully for enterine swimming data such as swim times for the newspaper reporting. Therre are some useful biology and science apps which I have donloaded and they are typically very useful but only for specific lessons.
   
   I have spoken with some students. Theuir reaction has been that the iPad is both fascinating and can be a big distraction to them. The students I spoke to are using their iPad in science classes and they are using the Al Gore "Our Choice" app.
   
   I have played with the potential of Dragon Speak for facilitating comment writing (a voice recogniton software program) but ultimately you have to speak so slowly and do so much editing that it is not that much of a time saver. I suspect that in general the iPad makes consumption of info easy, but production of information is much harder

iAnnotate bug resolved

The iAnnotate bug for downloading PDFs off the Web has been resolved. Please be sure to update the app.

Online apps for screencasts: screenr vs screencast-o-matic

This is a quick comparison between the free versions of screenr and screencast-o-matic.  

screenr.com, 5-min limit, must register using one of Google/Facebook/Twitter/Yahoo/LinkedIn/WindowsLiveID accounts, must save first to screenr.com and then can download mp4 file or post to YouTube.

screencast-o-matic.com

15-min limit, do not have to save to screencast-o-matic site, export to YouTube or download file (choice of mp4, flv, avi, or animated gif formats).

Winner: screencast-o-matic.com

In-class poll/survey on iPad/iPhone/laptop

If you want to take a quick pulse/poll/survey/quiz in class, there is a nice app for that: Socrative. For iPad/iPhone, there is a student version (iTunes link) and a teacher version (iTunes link). Both are free. You can also use Socrative on your laptop via a browser. A teacher creates an "activity" consisting of question(s) for which students provide responses. The teacher can choose between free-form responses or multiple choice. The teacher needs to register (email and password), but the students do not. 

Collaborate via blog? wiki? forum? real-time? - Part 2

This is Part 2 of my October post on collaboration. In this part I discuss the tools available for different collaboration modes and their pluses and minuses. 

Recording a lesson on your iPad

The task at hand is as follows: use the iPad as you would a whiteboard in a classroom and record your writing and your voice while you are doing it. Here's a 20-second example of this task accomplished with Explain Everything app:

In the PC/Mac/Online world, screencasting is a recording of anything you do on your computer screen. I have not seen a true screencasting app for the iPad. The existing apps restrict the recording to user actions within the screencasting app itself. In contrast, on a computer, a screencasting app can record a user interacting with any computer program, such as a PowerPoint presentation, a movie on the Web, a Microsoft Word document, etc. A post on creating screencasts online appears here.


The best of the available "screencasting" apps for the iPad is Explain Everything ($3). Here's the app's description on iTunes:

"Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. You can create dynamic interactive lessons, activities, assessments, and tutorials using Explain Everything's flexible and integrated design. Use Explain Everything as an interactive whiteboard using the iPad2 video display. 


Explain Everything records on-screen drawing, annotation, object movement and captures audio via the iPad microphone. Import Photos, PDF, PPT, XLS, RTF from Dropbox, Evernote, Email, iPad photo roll and iPad 2 camera. Export MP4 movie files, PNG image files, PDFs and share the .XPL project file with others for collaboration."

You can start with a blank whiteboard, a photo, a Powerpoint presentation, a PDF file, etc. You can then talk while doing any of the following: draw freehand, draw shapes, type, zoom in/out, edit/erase/rearrange objects, insert photos. At the end, you can export the screencast as a movie to upload to YouTube, your blog, your website, etc. It is well-integrated with Dropbox, both for import and for export, as well as many other popular services.


If you need a free app, Screenchomp, Showme, and Educreations are very similar to each other and very good. The limitation with all three is that you can only write freehand but not type.