The Wait is Over: Camtasia for Mac!
By Henrick Borger. Filed in educational technology, software, tools |Tags: mac, screencasting, tools
Back in Jan. of this year, I faced a real challenge. The college in Oman I was working for was going to implement the Blackboard LMS as part of its E–learning initiative. ‘What was the problem with that” you say? Namely that I was the brand-new e-learning coordinator for the college, and that it was my job to get all the English speaking faculty and staff up-to-speed with the technology.
The demographic of the faculty itself was the first problem. As with most colleges in the Middle East, most of the teachers were older (as to not having used an LMS before). Not many of them had degrees, or experience in educational fields (some were just ‘ex-pat English teachers’), and then there were the Luddites and technophobes. All in all, only 9% of the faculty (myself included) had ever taken an online class in a virtual learning environment, and only myself had ever moderated an online course before. Point is this: Almost all members of the faculty didn’t know how to use Blackboard, and not many were very enthused about learning it. Some were frightened, some intimidated, others confused.
Well, regardless of this challenge I managed to overcome the odds, and launched a mostly successful training program to prepare the faculty for this upcoming roll-out of Blackboard on campus. One of the major tools that helped me in this was Camtasia. Using the ‘30 day trial period’ product through TechSmith’s website, I was able to produce a series of ’screen-casts’ that allowed teachers to see what I was trying to demonstrate to them in text-based tutorials I had made.
Below, is a sample of one of the ’screencasts’ I had made using Camtasia:
At the time, I was using the current version of Camtasia (for Windows) on my Intel Macbook. I thought the program was excellent. I was a little ‘outclassed’ with the application at first (having never worked with screen-casts before), and it had a alot of features that I didn’t really understand at the time. Though I was able to produce a slew of screen-casting materials over the course of a month that helped me in meeting my deadlines and goals, with (in my opinion) a high level of quality in the materials I created (thanks to Camtasia).
I was really impressed by its ease of use, the options and features it offered, as well as the end-product it produced. I had tried some open-source stuff (CamStudio) as well as Jing Captcha! (which I’d been using for screenshots, and its great for that), but nothing produced anything I was truly happy with until I used Camtasia! One of the great features of Camtasia, was the ’smart focus’ feature. As a novice ’screencaster’, it gave my screen-casts a polished and professional finish that I would not have been able to do on my own at that point. It also allows you to create screen-casts for virtually any hosting service, format and screen size (Youtube, Ipod, AVI, MP4 etc.) with relative ease (just a click of a box). In my opinion it was an amazing product!
When the month was over, I didn’t end up purchasing Camtasia for two main reasons:
- The Price (it was 350$ and I wasn’t going to spend that on software at the time)
- It was for PC only (It was a real pain having to use the PC disk of my Mac just to create screencasts)
Though I vowed to myself on the 30th day that if it came out for Mac, I would buy it.
Well, now it is out… and I just ordered it! The kicker was that it has an introductory price of 99$ USD! This price is available until the 31st of Dec. So, if you like the idea (or the reality) of making high-quality screen-casts on your Mac, I suggest you put this piece of software on your Amazon wish-list for the holidays.
Well, now that I have it, I will be using it for a few projects I’ve been contemplating. I promise that once I’ve given it a thorough ‘run-through’ I’ll post a review on it.
Here is a link to TechSmith’s Product Website
Smoking Apples review of Camtasia for Mac Here
Do you own it yet? If so what do you think of it? Any feedback on any of TechSmith’s other products? Feel free to drop a comment.
Until next time…
