 Welcome to the first webinar in the DE webinar Wednesday series for fall 2017. I'm Tracy Shalen, distance education faculty coordinator at Southwestern College and today is our tech sampler. We're going to be taking a look at Camtasia, Snagit, VoiceThread, and ConferZoom all in one hour. So buckle your seat belts. We're gonna jump right in and the first thing that we're going to be talking about is our two TechSmith products, Camtasia and Snagit. So both of these products are made by the same company, TechSmith, and our college is lucky enough to have a site license for these products for use both on campus and at home, which we'll talk about today. So talking about Camtasia first, Camtasia is used to make instructional videos. It can also be used to make quick little hello videos or feedback videos for your students. It's a very flexible video recording and editing tool. So these are just two screenshots to give you some ideas and I'm actually going to pop into both Canvas so you can see some videos that have been embedded as well as Camtasia so you can see how they were made. First stop is a Canvas page. So this one has a video that's been embedded. This was made with Camtasia. It was actually made during our Camtasia training earlier this month. So I'm going to play just a little bit of this for you so you can see what it looks like when it's embedded in a course. So a couple of things about that video. As you can see, I'm at the seashore here and you might have seen another version of this video where there are fireworks going off behind me. It's actually the same video footage. I just put a different backdrop behind me so that's something that you can do in Camtasia. You can record yourself and then you can put anything you want behind you. It could be a PowerPoint slide. It could be your syllabus. It could be a photo or a video. So this one is a video. You could hear the waves coming in. So if you think about the content that you teach and how you could make that come-to-life video, you'll probably come up with some pretty exciting possibilities. The other thing that I wanted to talk about briefly is what you saw earlier. So the section that starts here that has the graphics in the beginning is something that Camtasia also provides. So all of these graphics were made by Camtasia and they come pre-loaded into the product. So I just selected the one that I liked and then I just typed in my custom content. Everything about how that content displayed was already set up by Camtasia. I simply typed in welcome to week two. Let's get started. The other thing that is built in is the audio that you hear, the little peppy music. So all of those sorts of stock items in Camtasia can help you put a little fun and polish into your video and you'll find that there are several different types of music to choose from and several different types of introductions to choose from as well. The other example I wanted to show you comes from the home page in a course that I'm currently teaching. I'm going to make this full screen so we can see it a little bit better. This also was made with Camtasia. Welcome to our course. I'm Tracy Shailen, your instructor. You've landed on the home page for our course. Playing video within video is getting us a little lag there. But as you can see, this has a still image in the back and a webcam video in the front. I've put a little border and shadow around it and it just plays in place on the page. So when the students come here, they simply are playing it. I'm something else that will happen in this video. I'm reminding them or calling their attention to the start here button. So I decided to actually put it into the video. And those sort of add-ons are very easy to do as well. Okay. The last one I want to show you is on our Southwestern College website actually. This is on the tenure review training page. There's a new series of videos that were made over the summer with Camtasia. And I'm going to play just the beginning of this one to show you another pre-built option for starting a video. The only things that were added were the words. And I'll just pause it right there. So the pre-built items in the beginning came with Camtasia. And then when it segwayed into a screencast here, this is just recording what was on the screen. And then you also can layer that with still images, in this case the image of a form. So Camtasia lets you bring in a variety of different media into one video. So there are lots of possibilities for this. Before we talk about how you can get Camtasia and use it, I'm going to talk a little bit about Snagit, which is the companion that comes bundled with Camtasia. Snagit is primarily for images. So video with Camtasia images with Snagit. And Snagit snags a screenshot of whatever is on your screen. You can choose what area of your screen you want to take the picture of. And then you can annotate it with things like you see here. You can add arrows, you can add text, you can add arrows and text, you can add numbers, you can add arrows or dialogue boxes or anything that's a basic shape you can put type into. You can circle things to draw your attention to them. You can also highlight. So it's a great way to show students how to do something. So in this case this comes from VoiceThread and these are instructions that show students how to put their image into their VoiceThread account. And there is text above and below this image, but this shows them what they'll see on the screen and what they need to do. So it's a great way to explain things to students without having to do it all in detailed text. The other thing that Snagit can do is record short videos. So in the example you see here, rather than take a picture, this is set up to record a video. And you would simply press this record button, start talking and it would record your audio as well as what's on the screen. And it's a little hard to see, but do you see how there's a yellow border around this area and everything behind it is grayed out? That's showing you what is actually being recorded. So I'm not recording all the other stuff in my browser window, my other tabs, I'm just recording what's here. And Snagit will automatically default to things like that. And then you can expand it or shrink the area that's being recorded if you want to. And then if you wanted to switch to webcam, you would simply press this button here and then it would switch to webcam. So Snagit recording will not be as fancy as Camtasia recording, but the same principles apply. So it will give you areas to record and you can customize it. And you'll be able to switch between webcam and screencast, but you won't be able to do one on top of the other. You won't be able to layer various items like we were looking at in Camtasia. That's kind of the essence of the two. I'm going to pop out and go into both of the programs to show you what it looks like. And then we'll talk about how to get them. So the first one I'm going to bring up is Camtasia. And this is actually that video that we were looking at. So here's what it looks like behind the scenes when you're creating the video in Camtasia. So the beginning part will look a little familiar to you. Now, if I wanted to change what these words say, all I do is double click on it and change it to something like this. And now the video will play those words instead. It's as easy as that. Very, very simple. I also can change what is going to be behind me. Remember that we had the over here, we had the part where I'm talking to the students. So now I've put some fireworks behind me. And all I did was go find the fireworks, add them into my Camtasia project and drop those behind what's called a green screen recording of me with a transparent background. And so you can choose what you want behind you and you can change it semester after semester or as you're making a different version of this video for another class. And you can use that same original recording and just change what goes behind you. So if I were to save this as a different name, then that would be an independent project. And I could find different backgrounds. Okay, the second thing I want to show you is what Snagit looks like behind the scenes. So this is the Snagit Editor. And these are some different images that I have been annotating. These were all taken from just one day. This was August 8th. So as you can see, I took a screenshot of something that was on my screen, and I added an arrow. Or I circled something. Or in the lower right corner, I added numbers. And the way that you do this is by clicking on capture. And that will bring up a screen that looks like this. And I would click on the capture button. And to see how it's automatically giving me areas to focus on, let's say this is the area that I wanted to take the picture of. So I click here. And now it took a picture of that. And I can add my arrows. So I could take an arrow, and I could point to those closed eyes. And maybe I want to add a call out, which would be a box with text. So I can choose one of those. And maybe I want to put it right here. And I could type something like don't forget to keep your eyes open. Alright, so now I've just annotated this image, and I could use this as I am training people on how to use Camtasia. So that took me less than a minute to do. And now I can save it as an image and put it anywhere that I would normally put an image in my course, in a Word document, in a PowerPoint slide, anywhere that I need it. So Camtasia and Snagit are both very user friendly and really powerful tools that you can use in all sorts of different ways. What I want to do now is show you how you can get these two tools and how you can start using them. So our Tech Smith site license is for both Camtasia and Snagit. And if you don't have it yet, here's how you get it. This is for all college employees. And so faculty are using it. We also have lots of people who are working in campus offices that are using it to make how to videos. So the way that you get there for a campus installation, either go through service now or email the it help desk directly. So we'll come to your campus computer and install it. But many people want to use this at home, especially for making videos. And our license allows that as well. You can put it on one or several home computers. So if you have a desktop as well as a laptop, you can put the Tech Smith products on both. The same goes for if you have one Mac and one PC. Both of these programs come in both platforms. So for at home use, you go to SharePoint, and you can get to SharePoint through MySWC. SharePoint actually is right there next to service now. So you could click there, you'll have to log in again, because it's not connected to MySWC login yet. And then you go to departments at the top row, and go down to training services. On the training services page, you will see a link toward the bottom for Tech Smith. And this is where the site license information is being kept. So here's the tricky, less intuitive part. After you click on Tech Smith, you will see a blank field in the middle with ad document. You have to click on ad document for the agreement to pop up. So once you click on ad document, this page will pop up, you'll give your name, your student or your faculty ID number, as well as some other general information. And then you will be given the license key for both Camtasia and Snagit. So save those keys. And you'll find a link that will take you directly to, in this case, the Camtasia installer. You'll find one for Snagit as well. And you already have the software key, so you'll download it, put in the software key, and then you will have that copy to keep in use on your home computers. So this is a software product that is installed rather than something that lives in the cloud. We did the Camtasia training a couple of weeks ago. And the Snagit training for this semester is going to be offered in October. And Andre Ortiz, who is the training services coordinator for our college, is in charge of the Snagit and Camtasia training. And he will be offering an online version in ConferZoom on the 25th and a face to face version in his new training lab on October 27. So he'll take an hour to go through how to use Snagit, how to annotate the screenshots, how to save them, and so on. So that might be a good next step if you're interested in learning more about Snagit. Okay, so we're going to move on to talk a little bit about VoiceThread. VoiceThread is a tool that lets you have conversations around media. And those conversations can happen in text, they can happen in video, and they can happen in audio, usually all three at once. So with VoiceThread you can upload a slide like you see here, you can upload a video, or you can upload an image and give directions to your students, and they will talk about what they see here. There's also a doodle tool that they can use to draw on the images. And as they make their comments, they line up here on the side. To hear and see all the comments, you can just press play at the bottom, or you can click on individual people to review their comments. And there are a variety of different comment tools that people can use. They can use audio, which is the one you see playing here. I'm going to go back a minute show you what the video looks like. And these can be open the larger as well. And then there also are text comments where people would simply type in the comments. Those are the most common ones. There's also a telephone option. So if you don't have a microphone, or if your students don't have a microphone, they can call in their comments as an audio comment. And then you also can upload something. So if you've recorded something, maybe in Camtasia, for example, you can upload that you don't have to just record in voice thread. So students really love voice thread because it frees them from the text heavy discussions that they often get in an online environment. And it lets them, you know, use their voice, it lets them have a sense of humor. It lets them communicate their enthusiasm. And it lets them see those things in their classmates as well. So people go from being just names to actual people, which builds community in the online classroom. So voice thread is one of those tools that if you use it once your students will be asking for it over and over and over. And that's a good thing. Another nice thing to know about voice thread is it taps into a variety of different learning styles versus just being a text on a page. And that means that it's really good for universal design, because it gives students multiple ways of presenting themselves and their ideas, multiple ways of expressing themselves, and then also multiple ways of engaging with the content. So if they want to type something, they can. But if they would rather be a little bit more kinesthetic and write on something and describe it as the writing on it, they have that option too in voice thread. So this is what voice thread looks like in Canvas. So this is the Canvas page, a little explanation, and then this is the voice thread displaying on the page. Students can actually leave comments and so can you right from the voice thread within Canvas. Or they can go a full screen if they want to. They can go out to voice thread.com and access it that way. But most of our students will just access it from within their courses. And actually we're going to go out to Canvas and show you what this looks like. So I'm going to pop over here to show you what one looks like in a Canvas page. So this is the slide, in this case it's an image, and if somebody wants to leave a comment here, they would click on the little plus button. And here are those choices we were talking about. This is for text, calling in audio only, or video, or upload. So I'm already using my microphone and my webcam right now. I'm just going to do the text one to show you what it looks like. I type my comment, I click save, and now there's my comment. I can make this window bigger if I need to. And if I want to respond to somebody else's, this little branch icon lets you leave a response. I'm only having a conversation with myself here, which isn't usual, but you get the idea. And if I didn't like my post, I can always delete it and try again. So this is how a basic discussion takes place in VoiceThread. And if I just wanted to play through the comments, I can do that as well. So if I just press play, it'll go through the first one, give me enough time to read it, and then go to the second one. And if there are more slides in this, I would use the next button, the next arrows here, to move through all the slides in the VoiceThread. Let's talk a little bit about the way that you can get VoiceThread. So we also have a site license for VoiceThread, and it's for use in Canvas courses. So if you were teaching in Canvas and you would like to try VoiceThread out, here's what you would need to do. First, you would need to go through the VoiceThread training. And the reason for that is that because it uses audio and video, we have some things to do to get you set up before you start using it. So we are going to be installing it in the courses that you would like to use it in, but we also are going to be showing you how you can make your VoiceThread accessible, primarily through captioning, although we'll talk about some other things too. And then we're going to set your VoiceThread account up with our captioning service, so that when you have done an audio or video comment, you can click a button to request captioning, and it will be sent off to our captioning service. A couple days later, it will be pushed back into your VoiceThread as captions. So it's a very easy and user-friendly process to make these VoiceThreads accessible, but it does take a little bit of setup and a little bit of training to make that happen. So training is required prior to joining our VoiceThreads site license. And if you missed the one that we did earlier this month, we have several coming up in the coming months. We have one in September, one in October, and then one in December. If you really want one in November, we could try to find a day that is not a holiday and set that up. Let me know. But it looked like our availability was a little more flexible in the other three months of the semester. So the training is two hours. One of them is face-to-face. Two of them are online. And during that time, you'll learn how to use VoiceThread in Canvas, how to create an assignment for VoiceThread in Canvas, what it looks like to grade a VoiceThread, and then how to set up your VoiceThread for accessibility. So we cover a lot in two hours, but it also gives you entrance into a VoiceThread resource shell in Canvas, where we have lots of materials, examples, sample PowerPoint templates that you could use to create your central images, like you see in the example here. This was actually made with PowerPoint, and so these are provided for you to customize if you would like to. So lots of good stuff, and it all starts with the training. And one other thing I should note, if you become hooked on VoiceThread, once you create one for one semester, you can copy it and use it for the next semester. And so the one that you see right here is actually something I have used so many times I've lost count. You make a copy of it, and what happens is all the student comments fall off. You can choose to keep yours or not, but if you've already gotten your comments captioned before, you probably want to keep them. It makes a new copy of the VoiceThread, you give it a new name, and then you can use it in the new semester. So you set it up well the first time, and then you can use it and reuse it and update it as you would like. It's also very easy to switch out slides and add new comments as you go. But with VoiceThread, it's designed to be something that you can use and reuse. Let's move on to talk about ConferZoom. So ConferZoom is something that, well we're using it right now, so we've been using it a lot for training, and a lot of people have been using it for office hours. So here's an example of what it looks like, and usually it's not quite as goofy as this, but it's a great way to have meetings as well. So this is actually three people who are on three different college campuses all coming together for a meeting and deciding to take a fun little selfie of ourselves while we are using Zoom. So ConferZoom is something that has been set up through the California Community College system, and it's actually been set up through the CCC Confer folks at Palomar College. And so if you use CCC Confer before, you will know that it uses a different tool, but that same group is bringing us ConferZoom. So to get a free account that's tied to the California Community College system, it's really important that you don't go to Zoom's commercial website, instead you go to the one for us, which is ConferZoom.org. So if you go to ConferZoom.org, which I'm going to do right now, you'll come to this page. And signing up is very simple as you can see. The key to getting your free pro account with ConferZoom is using your college email address. That's what's used for verification. And then you will designate here if you are administrative staff or faculty, accounts are available to all of those people, and the other parts here are optional. Then you click on sign up and very quickly you will get a confirmation email and you'll be ready to go. There are some guides that can walk you through how to use Confer as a participant and also as a host. So if you're wondering how to host a meeting like I'm doing today, this is the guide that will walk you through how to do it. It's 12 pages long, so it's very detailed, and it has lots of screenshots to walk you through what to do, including things like how to customize your account, how to install the desktop app, and then how to set up your meetings as well as how to run your meetings and what all of the little buttons down at the bottom of the screen mean. So this is here for you to use, but the first thing to do is to get your account. There's also a support link here, and so the CCC Confer people are available at this phone number email, and then there's even after-hours support, and they are very very fast and very good at getting your questions answered. So if you have any Confer Zoom support questions, the CCC Confer people are the folks to contact. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about how you can use Confer Zoom. One important note is, as we've talked about before, a special captioning module is being built for Confer Zoom so that you can have live captioning, which is a really important accessibility feature when you're using it with students. So kind of like you see down here at the bottom where it says closed caption, you'll have an option to set up captioning, and have a captioner join your meeting with your students and provide live captioning. So that is coming later this semester. Alright, so there are two ways that you can use Confer Zoom in your Canvas course right now. The first way, option one, is to share your meeting ID. So you are given a meeting ID by default. It's for your personal Zoom room. That's the one that I'm using for our meeting today. But for my courses, I can create separate Zoom room addresses for use with those different courses, and that way I'm not going to have students wandering in while I'm having a meeting using my other Zoom room. So each room has its own meeting ID, its own unique URL, and you can have as many of these as you would like to. So you can share that in your syllabus, on your homepage, which is where this screenshot comes from, and that way your students simply click on it to go there. You can also share this on your Canvas page, like I have right here. I have a link to the virtual office, and the way I created that was in the settings area of my course, and I went to the apps, and I looked for an app called redirect. I just typed it in and found it. It's very simple. All it does is let you add a link on your homepage, and so a list of the apps will come up, and redirect is one of them. So if you're interested in putting it on your homepage, you can, or on your course menu, you can, but you also can simply put the link on your homepage in your instructor contact info, and students can click right there to go into your virtual office. So that is option one. There is a new option that is just rolling out for installing ConferZoom on your course menu. So instead of what we were just talking about with a virtual office link, you can actually have ConferZoom show up as an option on your course menu. Notice I use Snagit, by the way, to take this picture and put in that little arrow. So let me show you what that looks like as well. Here is a course that has ConferZoom installed as an app and showing up on the course menu. So what you do is you set up what days and times you want to schedule these events, and then you and the students both would click on the ConferZoom link, and then click on the button that would say join when it's starting. Right now it says prepare because this isn't starting right away. If it was getting ready to start, it would be a gold button that says join. We would all click here and we would meet in the Zoom room together for our office hours or whatever the event was. So sounds good, but there's one really important caveat. As it currently is configured, you cannot control which Zoom room you and your students are sent to. It's randomly generated. So that means that if you do share your Zoom room on your syllabus and on your homepage, students may click there and not go here and click on the join button for the current session. So that is something that they are working on, but as of right now if you choose to use the built-in ConferZoom app, it's going to send you to a different random Zoom room each time. So for my class, I've decided not to use this yet until they get that worked out. And instead, I am using my own Zoom room where I can share that link with students in a variety of places. This is something that they're aware of and working on, but as of right now if you use ConferZoom, just be aware of that. So to get ConferZoom on your course menu, you would go to the course settings page. It'll take you to page that looks like this. You click on the navigation tab and ConferZoom down here is disabled by default and you can drag it up to here to make it show up for the class. So once you drag it up here, it will show on your course menu. Anything that you don't want on your course menu, you drag down to the hidden area. As you can see, I've done with the things that I don't want students to see or I'm not using. So that's the overview of ConferZoom and your two different options. I'm going to put them up here again for us to look at. Yes, Tracy, could you please show us what you've done for your virtual office hours because I think that'd be great since I teach online. Sure. Okay, so I'm going to go back over here to my live course. And one of the things that I do is put a link here. And let me actually show you what happens when you click on the link. So Zoom will give you a link for your your meeting ID. And like I said, you can create different ones if you'd like to. And when you put this in your canvas page, essentially what you're doing, if I go into the edit mode here, is you are typing some words. I use the words virtual office. And then you are linking and you just put the URL that they gave you in here. So Zoom will provide the URL for your meeting ID and you simply paste it in there and now this becomes a link. So if I'm a student and it's time for office hours, I would click here. Also in the beginning of the semester, I send out announcements reminding people that there's an office hour later today and I put a link in that announcement as well. So they would click here and it would launch the Zoom meeting. The first time they'll have to download Zoom to their computer, as we all did the first time we used it, but after that it'll be just like joining our meeting today. You just click the button and with one click you are in. So I put that there and then in my getting started module for students, I have a page that talks about virtual office hours. And I have a little video that I share with them that is a sample of me and Professor O'Copy here having a little Zoom session so they can see what it looks like. And then I also give them a link to that participant's guide so they can read through and get to know what the different tools are. And then I also provide a link to the virtual office hours on this page. So you can see why it's really important to me that I can use the same link because I provide that link to students everywhere so it's really easy for them to get to. And students who are using a mobile device especially appreciate that because they can just check their email where a copy of an announcement was sent and click on the link from there and open it up. So it's really nice to be able to access the Zoom room from a variety of different places. And another possibility that I have not used but some colleagues of mine have is you can make your virtual meeting space for office hours but also for students to meet. So if you have a custom meeting room ID for just this one course you can tell students that they can come in there and work on group projects together if they want to. So in other words your Zoom room for this class is always open and you can go into the Zoom settings for that Zoom room and allow people to join without the host. So while you're not there your students can arrange to meet there to work on a group project. And you'll get email notifications when they're in the Zoom room you could always pop in if you wanted to but that way you're providing a really easy and familiar place for them to do group work if they would like to. So you have lots of different options with Zoom. The important thing though just to reiterate is that you go through confer Zoom not the regular Zoom because if you go to Zoom's commercial site the account that you get for free will limit you to a certain amount of time I think it's 30 minutes and a certain amount of participants. And so both of those limitations would not meet your needs most likely for an online class. So the key is to sign up for Zoom through confer Zoom so that you have all those features. Thanks so much for joining us to talk about Camtasia, Snagit, VoiceThread, and Confer Zoom. I'll see you at the next webinar.