Yesterday I gave a short presentation to the Humanities Department at Imperial College as part of an e-learning staff development event. The live presentation wasn’t recorded so I decided that I should finally get around to producing a “slidecast”, something I’ve meaning to try for a while. A slidecast is a PowerPoint-style slide presentation with synchronised audio.
Making the Slidecast
Here’s what I did:
Step 1 – Preparation (10-mins): I started by making a few edits to the original PowerPoint slides – adding a title slide & hiding the students names. I also had a quick practice with the Wimba Voice Tools.
Step 2 – Recording (20-mins): I recorded the audio using Wimba while clicking through the actual PowerPoint slides. I decided I would restrict myself to one ‘take’ with no post-editing. However you could edit (& record) with free audio editing software such as Audacity. After making the recording (12’58”) I exported the audio file as an mp3 and then uploaded it to the Internet Archive.
Step 3 – Publishing (25-mins): This involved uploading the PowerPoint to Slideshare, a free service for sharing presentations and other types of files. I then used the built-in slidecast tool to synchronise the the audio file with the slides. This meant listening thru’ the whole recording again, hence the time required.
The final presentation is available via the slideshare website but can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. It was a very straight-forward process and not too time-consuming for a first attempt.
This is just one way of producing a “slidecast” and there are plenty of other options, so if it’s something you are interested in doing don’t hesitate to get in touch with us: clt-support@lse.ac.uk
Nice slidecast. Very good for a first attempt. A good alternative to using proprietary software such as Camtasia.
I really enjoyed this Wimba-talk and felt that it had all the important elements to capture student presentations. Camtasia is much more complicated to set up and the video picture is the least important part for language learning at an advanced level. Unfortunatel, when I came back to this blog today, there was no picture and I could not see the slide show any more, nor take notes on how you did it.