Creating Tutorials with Quicktime


Dear Reader, 
Before I continue, I will make a small disclaimer: The experience I am sharing in my posts is mainly my work with Apple Computer devices, as well as with software for Macs. But still, I hope you find it useful.

Before Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) allowed uploading videos to YouTube, it would only generate .swf files. A format that YouTube doesn't accept. A fact I learned the hard way.

I was preparing small videos with tutorials for teachers so they would feel more comfortable when they would start using Edmodo (http://www.edmodo.com). I was going to need about 30 in total. (Remember, small chunks of information is better.) I was faced with the frustration of already having created half of the videos and worried about the other half I needed. Honestly, I didn’t want to redo them, it had been a lot of work and now I didn’t have time. I thought to myself, “There has to be a way!”. In my search for that option, I came across Quicktime.

I’m sure there were other ways, but this was a simple, quick, painless solution. I looked for online converters, but they didn’t really satisfy my needs. Well, turns out you can record with Quicktime! Just choose File -> New Screen Recording. To think that all this time I thought it was just a video player. It had been always right there in front of me. 


How did it work? Simple. What I did was play my .swf files one at a time, recorded them with Quicktime, then uploaded the .mov files to YouTube. Yes, I know, the quality suffered a bit, but I didn’t have time to redo them. After “recovering” the videos, I went ahead and created the new ones I needed. Piece of cake!

By the way, Quicktime also allows movie recording and audio recording. 

So there you have it, this is the story of how Quicktime saved the tech trainer’s day!

Cheers!

Comments

  1. Marybell RodriguezOctober 3, 2012 at 9:28 PM

    Diana, thank you for sharing. It looks great. I'm going to test it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discovering Add-ons & Scripts

Image
Hi! It's back-to-school time. I hope your school year is off to a good start. As for me, it's been a very busy season. I can tell you that, amongst many other events, two major situations take place each year at my school: Open House and New Google Apps accounts. What's so special about these two? They both require a great deal of prepping and tech assistance. For instance, during Open House, the Tech Integration Team takes advantage that all the parents are present to have them register for tech orientation sessions. A couple of years ago, we'd lay out long sheets of lined paper, one for each different session, with a limited amount of lines. In the next years, we decided to take it a step further and created a Google Form. We had laptops available during each of the Open House nights and asked parents to register electronically to a tech session. While parents were submitting forms, I'd be in the background, checking numbers against the capacity we had fo
Read more

Voice Feedback in Google Docs

Image
Hi! I was recently asked by a teacher how she could provide voice feedback in Google Docs. Sometimes, it's better to record your feedback, rather than writing a long note, and I'm pretty sure students would appreciate listening to their teacher's voice too! Here are some options I found. They all work for Google Docs. Some will mention if they work on Google Slides or Google Classroom too. Mote This is a Chrome extension. The basic plan has some limitations , but it's ok. Mote creates a link to the voice note in a comment box. For a better experience, the kids would also need to install that extension, that way they wouldn't be taken out of the Google doc to listen to the message and could play directly in the comments box. Works the same also in Google Slides and in Google Classroom. Read&Write This is another Chrome extension, which also has other cool features you might like. Again, to better experience this feedback option, it is recommended that the student
Read more

Hello World!

Hello World! This is how I started my first tweet some years ago and this is how I start my first public blog. I am trying to reach anyone out there that shares the same interests I have. The purpose of this blog is to share my experience as a technology trainer at an elementary school. I will be posting what has worked for me, any resources I recommend, and in general, the day to day experiences I go through in my daily life. Check back frequently and feel free to comment and share your experiences too. Let the learning begin!
Read more