Top Ten Tips for Creating Effective Screencasts

If you remember, back in January I created a weblog post regarding how good screencasts are to augment instruction and knowledge sharing, specially when you would need to conduct demos or show people about a new tool, a new process, whatever, you name it. Having the possibility of not just listening but also viewing something on your computer screen is perhaps having the best of both worlds, both audio and video. And specially for visual learners it is a must-have, I would imagine.

Back then I mentioned how for quite some time now I have been trying quite a few options till I actually found the one that I am sticking around with till now (Oh, by the way, did you know that there is a new version of Wink, v.2.0, with a whole bunch of new features, including audio? Worth while a try for sure). And that would be TechSmith Camtasia Studio. Well, just this morning, and while going through my daily RSS feed reading, I bumped into this particular item by Bill Myers Online that I am sure you would also find very beneficial: Top Ten Tips for Creating Effective Screencasts.

Indeed, even though I have been using Camtasia Studio for some time now after going through those Top 10 tips I actually got to learn a trick or two that I was not aware of and that I am sure that they would help me get better and better at doing screencasts. Thus I just had to weblog about it so that I would not forget about them and could then apply them right away in my next screencast shows.

Just in case you may not have time to watch the actual screencast Bill Myers Online has put together on the subject, or to read the actual ten tips here you have got a teaser description of all of them to give you a quick overview of what they are. At the same time this would also help me keep track of them and remind me of trying to do better and much more effective screencasts and with these tips I am surely going on the right track. Thus here they go:

Top Ten Tips for Effective ScreenCasts:

1. Start with Camtasia Studio: indeed, my favourite tool so far from all the ones I have tried so far.
2. Use a USB digital microphone.
3. Position the microphone to prevent popping.
4. Use an enhanced cursor.
5. Close unneeded programs.
6. Set the size of the stage.
7. Do a trial run.
8. Plan to make mistakes.
9. Edit ruthlessly.
10. Publish to flash.

Good stuff, indeed ! A big thanks from here to Bill for sharing these tips with us and help us get the message across that screencasting can certainly be very helpful while trying to promote eLearning, collaboration and knowledge sharing within any organisation.

Technorati Tags: Screencast, Wink, Camtasia, Learning, eLearning, Knowledge Sharing, Top 10

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 9:07 am and is filed under Productivity Tools, Knowledge Snippets, Screencasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.