Blog 6 - Cam Studio Video

Today I’m going to blog about CamStudio and an assignment that we did to go along with it. CamStudio is an open source screen and audio capture software, it can be found at http://camstudio.org/. It’s a pretty need little software package that lets you record whatever you’re doing on screen and converts it to an .avi format and allows play back. You can also record your voice as well if you have a simple headset or regular desktop microphone. The assignment we did ties into an assignment we started last semester which was creating a TSTM wiki. The wiki has entries on all kinds of things ranging from learning methods to tutorials. This new assignment had us pick a topic in Open Office or from one of Google’s many apps and create a short video tutorial on how to use it. I choose to do mine on Google Maps, and the features that I discussed were how to set a default location and then navigate to a new location. I also showed them how to zoom in to get details and to switch to street view to actually get a glimpse of the actually location so they don’t drive past it. One thing that I left out but didn’t mean to was the print feature which gives you a printer friendly version to use. Overall I enjoyed the project and hope it turns out to be a successful despite all the problems some people have been encountering trying to upload and even record the video.

Blog 5 - Loman Home Trip Report

In this installment of Brandon’s TSTM 544 blog I’m going to reflect back upon my most recent trip to the Loman Home. I didn’t feel as nervous as I did this go round because we had signup sheets that lets us know how many folks would be attending and at the time we only had three signed up for and that was great. Smaller groups are easier to handle and you’re also able to help them one on one more. I also felt pretty confident about our presentation; we had a power point set up with arrows and boxes that outlined each step that was necessary to follow along with during our presentation. What I also liked was our power point was easy to follow and there were able to take a copy home in case they needed to go back and check something on their own they would have the steps handy. Our work shop was on Open Office Writer and we showed them how to open the program and start a new document. We provided them with a dummy document to teach them how to use the spell checker and also how to add a word to the computers dictionary. After that we had the type their name’s and showed them how to change the font, size, and the color, most of them got a pretty good kick out of that. Once that was all done we showed them how to save the document and how to make it compatible with all the other word processors out there. Overall I thought the work shop went well and a couple of things caught me by surprise, one was that a few our a trainees were already proficient in open office which I was thoroughly impressed with and the other was that instead of only having three show up we had a full class. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the Loman Home and would do it again in an instant.