Video

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Video is an extremely effective tool to capture your audiences attention if done correctly. I have certainly seen many that need more work and I find that can be one of the drawbacks. To make an amazing presentation it takes A LOT of time which is sometimes the one thing we don’t have enough of. We may have the skill but, lack the time it takes to make a good video presentation great.

I have used PowToon in the past when a teacher wanted to use a different presentation tool other than PowerPoint. Her students were creating the presentations so I taught them how to use PowToon. It was a very effective tool and was easy for students to sign up because they all had a school email account. They had to login the day of the presentation and show it directly from their account. The students really liked that it was different and quickly picked up how to use it because it is fairly simple to navigate. I logged back into my account and saw several samples that I made in 2014, it was fun to reminisce.

I used Jing in LIBS 605 when I worked with a teammate on the digital curation project. We used Prezi and Jing to show classmates about Edshelf. You do have to download the program to your computer but it is free and is fairly easy to use. It’s a great program to record tutorials on how to do something that you could share with others. It runs all the time behind the scenes and you just click on one of the capture buttons depending on if you are getting a screen shot or video recording. I think this would be an effective tool to use with students if you are showing them how to do a task on the computer. You could even record something and require them to watch it later.

I decided to make a Wideo and they do have several templates to choose from but of course you have a better selection if you have the paid for Pro version. The tool isn’t too difficult to maneuver but I had trouble editing the preset text. I opened the chat window to ask how to edit text (which should have been easier) and I got completely random answers that were obviously from some kind of automatic response system. I looked again and of course it was. I had to switch computers because I was working on my laptop and things didn’t go smooth. As soon as I switched to my desktop computer things got a little easier. I still could not edit the person that appeared in my video so after adding everything I ended up quitting that Wideo and moving on to using a different template that was a little more user friendly. Here is the result:  My Wideo I wanted to make some of the slides longer but, I got the message that I could only have a certain amount of time. I honestly wouldn’t use this tool with students. It’s neat but the free templates are limited and it is too frustrating. I’d choose PowToon over this most days! When I tried to download this so that I could put it on my Google Drive they wanted my credit card information and $49.00. I found that to be a little disheartening too…really, $49.00 for one download?!