Academic Musings & Tech for Learning

Free application to capture and record stuff on your desktop – absolutely fabulous for quick how-to’s and sharing .. Jing at http://www.jingproject.com/ . There an intro and video on how to use Jing at http://blog.jingproject.com/2007/07/how_do_i_use_this_thing_called.html. There are MAC and PC versions. TechSmith makes Camtasia, and Snagit. Jing is akin to Camtasia “light” and may be a great solution in lieu of the more pricey Camtasia or Captivate.

I made this quick tutorial using Jing to show how to edit the slide master in my Jeopardy game.

It very simply captures screenshots and sends them to your flickr account .. or gives you a link to share it or embed it .. but much more than that, you can record a voice narrated tutorial as well and annotate the screenshot. Check it out.

For PC users: www.giveawayoftheday.com is a site you should check daily. There’s also a sister site, http://game.giveawayoftheday.com . Everyday they give away one software title – free. You must download and INSTALL the software that day. The titles change at 3 AM ET. Now, there will often be software that you will never use, didn’t know you needed, or you may already have something similar. But, you never know when they will have something of value for you. In my last post, I talk about FlashSpring Pro.. a $199 program that was the giveaway a couple of days ago – great value to me. The daily giveaway is for software that you would otherwise have to pay for.

I’ve got the feed on the sidebar here. Check it out.

www.giveawayoftheday.com offers a different software application every day for free on that day only. This week I hit the jackpot with FlashSpring Pro 2.0 – it converts PowerPoint Presentations to Flash!

I was starting to research this kind of software and there is was FOR FREE!! (It’s $199 and $120 with Education discount.) Read all about it here.

How did it work.. ALMOST perfectly.. I was able to convert my USA MOVIE to a flash file. This software solved 2 problems for me. 1) PowerPoint doesn’t embed MP3 files and this does. and 2)It makes the file non-editable (protected). I had to alter the transition timings to compensate for the conversion lags.. but for simpler presentations, it was flawless. You can watch my USA People & Places movie to see the results. There’s another (shorter, no sound) presentation here. This is a much better solution than zipping up your presentation with your audio files. The user doesn’t have to download anything (assuming he/she has Flash player installed – and almost everyone does).

What it DOESN’T do.. convert your internal links if they are on a Master Slide (and so many are)You’re presentation has to be linear. There are other converters on the market – some are a lot more expensive. (Maybe one of these preserves internal links? Will have to research later on.) Anyway, this one works pretty well if you ever need one. There’s an upgrade coming soon that WILL convert links on masters slides! It’s expected next month.

Educational discounts are available – see FAQ for details on company website – 40% off.