Oct 08 2008
Screencasting with a Smartboard – worth the effort?
Now that I am geting settled into my new room, I thought I would try to practise using the Smartboard. It’s been playing up since I moved in, the internal walls of the building are plastic-covered sheets of steel and they seem to have caused an earthing problem inside the Smartboard 660 model that was fitted in my room, The room next door has a 580 version and it is unaffected as it hangs from a bar rather than screwing to the wall.
Yesterday afternoon, I got the all clear to start using the IWB and I set about trying to make a screencast of a worked solution to this week’s Higher Phsyics homework. I found that the files generated by the SMART recorder were enormous (>40MB for a 3 minute clip) and so I set about working on ways to reduce the file size.
First of all, I reduced the capture rate to 1 frame per second. That seems slow but I find the response of the board quite slow when I am writing anyway. Then I set the recorder to “no audio” and drew a capture area on the board rather than having the entire workspace captured. All of these changes brought the files down to around 5MB each, a much more reasonable figure.
I was going to send the video to Voicethread.com so that both myself and pupils could add a commentary but the site didn’t want to accept the file. Instead, I imported the .mov files into Apple’s Garageband to dub a commentary over the top. GB lets you do this as long as you agree to ditch the default podcast track at the top of the screen that is used to sync still images to podcasts. Then it was a simple case of recording commentary as I watched the clips playing through before exporting them to the hard drive and uploading to youtube.
I’m pleased with the results. Whether this is a justification of the costs in another matter. I suspect that the same result can be achieved with a more portable resource such as a tablet. Here is a sample screencast.