No ShrinkWrap Web2.0 Reviews

Sportscasters sometimes make sports interesting to watch with their instant replays, on-screen pen drawings and playback narratives. After watching some recent political speeches and reading articles like this one on FoundRead about politicians’ body language, I wondered - what if speech instructors could use the same sportscaster-style tools to critique speeches? Invite some students to play the part of the “sportscasters” and you have an assignment students not only enjoy doing, but contribute to the content of the course. Have different students participate each week over the course of the class, and you have a video podcast the class can publish. Here’s a quick example of what your class could create using Camtasia.

The magic sauce for creating this type of video is the ScreenDraw tool. To make this tool easily available, click on View > Annotation Toolbar in the Camtasia Recorder window:

After you begin recording the screen, enable the annotation tools by clicking on the ScreenDraw icon on the Annotation toolbar. This gives you access to several screen-drawing tools, including a free-form drawing pen, several shape tools, a highlight tool and an arrow tool, all with configurable widths and colors. You can access the different tools and options by right-clicking inside the area you are recording:

For more information on how to use the annotation tools, see Techsmith’s online documentation.

Do you have creative uses for Camtasia in the classroom? I’d love to hear them - share them in the comments below!

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