Screencasts are recordings of screen actions and are very useful for showing procedures in a computer interface, as they reveal the mouse movements, clicking, typing, and more than that, audio comments. With Google Hangouts, it's really easy to create screencasts, just like the commented screenshots we saw previously.
Screencasts will be an important part of our course, as we will use them to create tutorials that support students in the use of the several tools used in the course activities. Hangouts is quite cool as it saves the screencast in YouTube, which we will then make available as a resource (link to a file) in our course.
Just before starting the screencast, we need to connect the microphone and headphones (the headset) to the audio ports in our computer, with the pink jack to the pink connector and the green jack to the green connector respectively.
After opening a new Hangout, we just have to perform the following steps:
- Click on the Screenshare option in the left menu.
- Select an application window already opened in our computer.
- Start broadcasting.
- Perform the actions with audio comments.
- Stop broadcasting.
That's it!
When I was a kid, I had a flipbook that when flipped, showed a woman getting up from bed. Page by page, the changes were too small to notice but from beginning to end, they meant the difference between being in bed and being up. In stop motion, this is the main concept—the accumulation of small changes of position in usually nonmoving objects that, when properly sequenced, simulate movement.
For the course in our module dedicated to music, dance, and emotions, one of the tasks will be to create a stop motion movie of a clay character that will be breakdancing. For this we will use JellyCam (http://www.ticklypictures.com/shop/jellycam). To start, we should perform the following steps:
Source: fronx (2012), plasticine chimp [head] Retrieved June 5, 2013, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/fronx/8266605549/
- Connect your camcorder or webcam to the computer and then open JellyCam. The webcam image will show on the Add Webcam Pics window.
- Activate the Show Onion Skin tool. This allows us to see the previous position of the object with a level of opacity a little bit below the next image to be captured by the camera, similar to a ghost of the previous frame.
- Click on the Take Pic button. A frame will be added to the Frames window.
- Change the clay model to simulate a small movement. Take a pic and repeat the process as many times as needed.
- Manage the frames in the Frame window, delete those that didn't work well, or rearrange them as needed.
- Click on the Play button to preview the frames animation. We can change the frames per second value to have smoother (higher value) or more robot-like movement (lower value).
- Save the animation project.
- Export the project as a video (the
.flvformat) clicking on the Create Movie link.
Finally, to add the movie to Moodle we could, for example, publish the final video to YouTube and embed it.
