What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial? Why?
We used Screencast-O-Matic to create the Professional Development tutorial on Jing. The presentation was put together on Power Point slides and the post production of the screencast was done in Camtasia Studio while Audacity was used to remove unwanted noise. We actually first wanted to use Jing also for the tutorial, but with the 5 minute recording limit that didn't quite work out, so we had to settle for Screencast-O-Matic. I personally used it also in this course for the Wicked Problem (C) blog post and upgraded to the pro version in order to get rid of the logo on the final product.
In all fairness the end result is pretty good. Screencast-O-Matic's video quality is inferior to that of Jing itself which is resulting in a less than perfect image performance.
What did you learn during the development process of the final product?
Most importantly how long the screencast is desired to be. With the Jing the 5 min limit is quickly reached and not adequate for a real tutorial. Also, Screencast-O-Matic doesn't allow for editing of sound or video so we needed to use Audacity for the sound and Camtasia Studio for the video. Furthermore, I thought the process would be slightly easier and less time consuming. I'm sure there must be a more efficient manner.
What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?
The planning and preparation (story boarding) phase was for sure not as efficient as we anticipated. Although we thought we would be working very collaboratively through a Google Docs document it ended up to be quite a hassle with virtually complete rework through email. The editing function in Google Docs didn't work as well as needed and we couldn't properly work on the layout and design. Even the presentation order was virtually fixed. Moving text became an issue and at certain moments we lost text. I'm not a fan of Google (Docs) and this experience for sure has confirmed my negative thoughts about the big G. In order to do an improved planning and preparation phase I would want to have a different story boarding tool.
Sorry to hear that the Google docs collaborative experience wasn't a smooth one. There are many free tools out there that can be used the same way: Zoho, inetword, adobe buzzword, just to mention a few. There have been occasions that Google has frozen up on me - and I ended up losing some information. Thank heaven for email - sounds like you group did a wonderful job of moving to plan b for group work communication.
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