Introduction to Camtasia

Over the years, you have probably been exposed to many different digital media tools that teachers use and integrate with their students. The problem with many of these tools is using them requires certain levels of expertise and also requires that, periodically, you invest time in updating your skills. You also have to have some technical support and funding to purchase or update software and hardware. Another problem with many tools is you have to constantly update the tool’s products. For example, to have a classroom blog or wiki requires teachers to often spend time every day or at least a few times a week keeping the content up to date.

Because of these various barriers, many teachers do not use or integrate various digital media tools. However, there are user friendly digital media programs that teachers can use to improve student performance and not have to update once the instructional products are created. One of the major objectives of this course is for you to learn how to use and more importantly integrate a fun and easy to use software program called Camtasia. You have already watched two Camtasia videos that were created by teachers for their students. As you will learn over the next few weeks, Camtasia is a very powerful screen capture program, a great video editing program, and contains many built in tools for rendering your video creations so your students can watch and interact with your instructional videos virtually anytime and anywhere. Most importantly, Camtasia, unlike many other video programs, is very easy to use. As you will see, the learning curve is very quick and the potential of integrating Camtasia is limited only by your and your students’ imagination. Finally, once you create your classroom– and kid–specific instructional videos for your students and their parents, they are good for a very long time.

So let's get started...

What is Camtasia – Camtasia Studio is a comprehensive suite of applications that center around the recording, editing, and sharing of screen video content. We call this screen video content “screencasts” for short. You can use Camtasia to basically create two kinds of video screencasts: (1) Capture from your PowerPoint presentation; and (2) Capture what you do on you computer screen, which is very useful when demonstrating science projects from the Web, demonstrating how to use software, and so many other things.

So you know, Camtasia is sold by TechSmith and the education price is $179. However, you do not need to purchase Camtasia to complete your final project in this class. TechSmith allows you to download a 30–day free trial. Important Note: Please do not download your free trial version this week. We will do this in Week 6 and the reason is simple: we don’t want your free trial to expire before you finish your final project.

If you have completed this page, continue to the Assignment page.