Screencasting

From screenshots to screencasting in one bound! Below is my first attempt at using Screencast-o-matic. It can be seen as a companion piece to the How to place a hold video created by Gareth 2.0, since it demonstrates another facility offered by the King's College webcat - namely the ability for students to make online book purchase requests.



Despite the process of creating a screencast being very easy to pick up, it still took me quite a few attempts to produce this, since I kept moving the mouse around a bit too erratically and mistyping words. You have to be very calm and measured to get things to happen smoothly. The finished version is still not very polished - no soundtrack for one thing I'm afraid - and I may have gone a bit fast in places, but I think it does the job it is intended to do. I like the captions facility, and the ease of slotting them in at the exact second you want them, but you do have to remember to allow for the fact that when they appear they obscure the lower part of the screen.
Rather than upload the video to YouTube, I created a Screencast-o-matic account and uploaded it to their own facility, which gives it its own page where further editing can be done and other people can make comments if they wish. It also provided me with the code I needed to embed the video in this blog, although sizing it to fit the space available means the text is very small. You can click on the pop out button in the top right hand corner of the video to view a bigger version, or view the full size version here.
I'm sure there are lots of ways we could use screencasts to demonstrate various library processes, but we would have to be very pro-active in making students aware of their existence, otherwise they would be a waste of effort. Maybe they would be best featured on our Facebook page, and highlighted at the beginning of each academic year.