In 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing

Excel, JavaScript, and Other Helpers and Videos
Bob Jensen

Department of Business Administration
Trinity University

Table of Contents

Video (Scroll Down)

Screen Capture

Audio

Excel

JavaScript

The best use of a teacher's videos, in my viewpoint, is by students seeking to learn something technical that an instructor does not want to have to explain over and over in class and in office hours ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

TeacherTube (a video server for teachers) --- http://www1.teachertube.com/

"University of Leeds Plans to Capture 50,000 Hours of Video Annually With Mediasite," by Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, February 10, 2014 ---
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/02/10/university-of-leeds-plans-to-capture-50000-hours-of-video-annually-with-mediasite.aspx?=ct21

The University of Leeds in the United Kingdom is deploying Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform for lecture capture and multimedia management. The Mediasite system automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand videos and rich media.

"This is a significant investment which will transform teaching and learning here at Leeds," said Neil Morris, director of digital learning at the university, in a prepared statement. "Not only can we capture all our audio and video assets, but Mediasite will allow us to store, manage and publish content across multiple channels."

While the university had previously captured lectures on a limited scale, it wanted to scale up its efforts with a single video platform that integrates with its Blackboard learning management system. Expecting to capture about 50,000 hours of content annually, the school plans to record lectures and other teaching activities to give students a flexible and personalized approach to learning. All content will be searchable, secure and managed in one place via Mediasite.

"We know our students learn in different ways, so as well as attending lectures, this gives them the opportunity to engage with the materials wherever they may be and at their own pace," continued Morris. "Whether that's going over topics that are particularly complex or using recordings to help with revision, this new system will provide over 30,000 students with outstanding resources to support their learning."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's video helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Video

Also note that BYU teaches the first two accounting courses almost entirely on video with only infrequent classroom meetings ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

Update on BYU Flipped Variable-Speed Video Courses in Accounting
BYU replaced live lectures in the on-campus two introductory courses in accounting with variable -speed video 15 years ago. I wrote about the pioneering efforts of adjunct professor Norman Nemrows who developed these CDs years ago ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
The variable speed videos enable students to navigate more efficiently through the video files and to slow down on parts they want to study.
I think Norm supervised the courses and held office hours when students wanted some help. As I recall he did all this for $1 per term.

This was a one of the early campus classroom replacements on online lectures with video. My contention then and now was that this would not work well on many campuses. It worked well at BYU because the accounting majors are nearly all highly motivated students who learn well on their own or in small groups. In a course having a high proportion of unmotivated students there is generally more need for live instructors to kick butt.

2015 Update
"When a Flipped-Classroom Pioneer Hands Off His Video Lectures, This Is What Happens," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/When-a-Flipped-Classroom/151031/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

In a way, there are two Norman Nemrows. There’s the real-life professor who spent much of his career teaching accounting students at Brigham Young University. And there’s the one I'll call Video Norm, the instructor immortalized in lectures on accounting that he began recording nearly 15 years ago.

For more than a decade, students at BYU learned from both Norms. About half of the class sessions for his introductory-accounting course were "software days," when students watched an hour or two of video lectures on their computers anywhere they wanted and then completed quizzes online. The other class periods were "enhancement lectures," in which students—as many as 800 at a time—gathered in a classroom and did group work led by the actual Mr. Nemrow.

Back when it started, in 2000, this method of reducing in-person classes and replacing them with videos and tutorials was an innovation, but today it is a buzzword: the flipped classroom.

A few years ago, the living, breathing Norman Nemrow retired from the university. And that’s when things got interesting, or at least more complicated, because students at BYU still learn from Video Norm.

In fact, every student taking introductory accounting at the university watches the video lectures, some 3,000 students each year. And the in-person sessions? They’re now led by another accounting professor, Melissa Larson, who has been thrust into the novel role of doing everything a traditional professor does except the lecturing. The tough question—and one of the biggest for the future of the flipped model—is whether other professors will be willing or able to become sidekicks to slick video productions.

Ms. Larson gets high marks on student evaluations for leading group work in the large classroom sessions and answering questions by email. But Video Norm remains the star.

That was clear when Mr. Nemrow showed up, in person, at the end of the fall semester to give a guest lecture for the introductory course. You’d think a Hollywood actor had come to campus. Students showed up early to take selfies with the professor they had spent so many hours watching on video.

"We got front-row seats," said Celeste Harris, a junior in the course. "We said, we have to see what this guy is like in real life."

How did Mr. Nemrow compare with the digital version? "He’s a little older than when he recorded the videos," Ms. Harris noted, "but it was actually one of the best lectures I’ve heard." It was inspirational, she said, because Mr. Nemrow recounted the story of this unusual accounting course, which has become a kind of legend on the campus.

From Business to Teaching

Mr. Nemrow started out as a businessman. He worked at a consulting firm in California, then helped start a real-estate-investment firm. But he was drawn to the classroom. For years he taught accounting on the side, first as an adjunct at California State University at Fullerton, then full time at Pepperdine University.

Around the time he turned 30, he sold his business and decided to retire early. He didn’t want to do nothing, but he no longer had to work for money, he says, even with a wife and five small children.

"I didn’t really have a burning desire to create another business," he says. He took some art classes. He played a lot of golf. "For a couple of years I was trying to kind of find myself," he recalls. "I decided what I really wanted to do is probably teach."

So he called up the dean of the business school at his alma mater, Brigham Young, and asked if there was a teaching spot for him. He had a master’s degree but not a Ph.D., and at first the answer was no. "When I told him I was willing to do it as a volunteer, his attitude changed," Mr. Nemrow recounts, with a laugh. "He let me teach the intro course for a year."

BYU hired Mr. Nemrow as a full-time professor. He donated his salary to the university, he says. A devout Mormon, he saw the work as a way to give back to the church. In his mind, that left his teaching in the category of volunteer work. "I wanted to have complete and total freedom, and I didn’t want to make a commitment to how long I’d be there."

After several years of teaching the introductory course, he says, he began to get tired of repeating himself and answering the same questions. He considered writing a textbook and even drafted a couple of chapters. "But I thought to myself, this isn’t as effective as when I’m explaining it in person."

So, in 1998, he approached the university’s fledgling instructional-technology group and pitched his idea to reformat his course around a series of videos and computerized homework assignments. "They were worried about getting funding, so I just put up the money myself," about $50,000, he says.

After two years of development and some lobbying to persuade the accounting faculty to let him try his flipped experiment, Video Norm was born.

Mr. Nemrow says the software increased the number of students he could teach at one time, while reducing the time it took him to do it. And he says his surveys showed that 93 percent of his students reported learning more effectively from the flipped format than from a traditional one. Both his inner businessman and his inner philanthropist thought: This is going to be big.

Hitting the Road

Mr. Nemrow believed that his system was simply better than the old way, and he thought that once other accounting professors saw it, they’d immediately adopt his videos and software rather than the textbook-and-lecture method.

He started a company, Business Learning Software Inc., to manage and update the videos and the delivery technology. True to his desire to keep his teaching like volunteer work, he says, he donates any profits to charities. Because the software and videos were developed at BYU, the university owns them and gets a portion of any revenue from their sale. And he made all of the videos for his intro course available free online.

Mr. Nemrow traveled to accounting departments and academic conferences around the country, evangelizing his teaching approach and his software. But, to his surprise, he found few takers.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade (including flipped classrooms) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Screencast (I like Camtasia) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast

I flipped my classrooms largely by preparing hundreds of short Camtasia how-to video on technical aspects of my accounting theory and AIS courses --- especially on technical aspects of FAS 133 and MS Access relational database accounitng. My students just were not getting some of this technical I explained in class, and I grew weary repeating the same material over and over and over again in my office. The Camtasia videos were a huge relief to my students and me. They could play each Camtasia video repeatedly until they mastered the topic. I rarely had to explain those topics during office hours when Camtasia explanations were available to students.

The Camtasia videos also meant I did not have to devote so much class time to teaching technical procedures. This made more free time for class quizzes to verify that students were really mastering those technical opics.

"Data on whether and how students watch screencasts," by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 4, 2013 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2013/04/04/data-on-whether-and-how-students-watch-screencasts/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Chromecast --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast
"Streaming Video Magic with Chromecast," by Ryan Cordell, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/streaming-video-magic-with-chromecast/52969?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

However, there are quite a few other screeencast video capturing alternatives and hosts ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software
This is a pretty impressive Wikipedia comparison site!

Most faculty serve up video from their university's servers, YouTube, and Tech Smith's Screencast, but there are other alternatives

"How to Choose the Right Host For Your Online Video," By Robin Miller, ReadWriteWeb, July 25, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/how-to-choose-the-right-host-f.php

Bob Jensen's video helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm

Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm

You can view an outdated tutorial video for a very old version of Camtasia that I captured for my students to years ago to help them when learning Camtasia. ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/CamtasiaTutorial.wmv
Although the newer versions of Camtasia changed screen capturing somewhat, the screen capturing process is almost the same process today as I illustrated in the above video.

In my viewpoint Camtasia is still the gold standard for video screen capturing although the price is now over $300 for the latest version. As Richard suggested, you might begin with the Jing free version, but for compression you will have to move up to Jing Pro or Camtasia.

Normally you capture avi files that are easy to edit but are enormous in size. Compression ("producing") saves you over 90% of video file size without serious loss of quality. However, save your initial avi files in case you want to edit the videos later on and re-compress them.

When I made the above tutorial video I was mostly creating rm Real Media compressions. Later I shifted to wmv compressions since my students mostly used Windows Media Player for playback.

You can view samples of my Camtasia files at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/

One of the better examples of Camtasia capturing is Amy Dunbar's video.
May 31, 2010 message from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
.

I just finished the first week of a 12-week MSA online tax course at UConn. I put students in groups and I ask them to work fairly lengthy quizzes (homework) independently, putting their answers in an Excel spreadsheet, and then they meet in chats to discuss their differences. When they can’t resolve a question, they invite me into chat. This week a student introduced me to Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way this tool could be used in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly on Thursday to illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with other group members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in case some of you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.

http://users.business.uconn.edu/adunbar/videos/GoogleDocs/GoogleDocs.html 
 

If anyone wants the “quiz” that the students worked, send me an email (not AECM), and I will send you the file.

Amy

Amy Dunbar
University of Connecticut School of Business
Department of Accounting
2100 Hillside Road Unit 1041 Storrs, CT 06269-1041  
amy.dunbar@business.uconn.ed 

January 7, 2010 reply from Richard Campbell

Techsmith's Jing is free (ad supported) and Jing Pro is almost free ($20 per year) www.jing.com  The Jing files can be imported into Camtasia for editing.

Techsmith's Hosting service www.screencast.com  is free (limited bandwidth and storage) and Screencast Pro is about $100 per year. Much more st, orage and ad free.

January 8, 2010 reply from Richard Campbell

Techsmith has a channel on youtube with a lot of education-focused videos --- http://www.youtube.com/user/ChannelTechSmith 

Educators get special pricing on Camtasia - around $150 instead of $300 --- http://www.techsmith.com/community/education/ 

Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Three ways to save video from the Internet ---
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11327_7-6555399-1.html?tag=rb_content
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube

An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert. Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf

This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips for video projects as well as free online communication tools.

My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of work that they are now sharing with us.

Audio Capturing Without a Microphone When Recording Parts of Camtasia videos
Note that in the video below, the explanation begins 1:10 (70 seconds) into the video at the top of this Camtasia helper page ---
http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtas... 
.
The above video explains how to record some audio in Camtasia without having to run that audio through a microphone such as when you want to embed part of a YouTube video in your Camtasia video.

Note that this may not work in Windows XP systems. In days of old some of my my embedded clips of video had poor sound quality due to having to hold my microphone near the speakers. Of course it was possible to edit in avi clips recorded on other capture software, but this was a pain.

Over the years this has been my major complaint with Camtasia video recording. Windows 7 users can now more easily work around the problem.

Also note this has never been a problem in Camtasia video recording on a Mac.

Here's a link that provides other tips on how to improve audio quality in Camtasia videos
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/docs/onlinehelp/enu/700/Get_Great_Sound_with_Camtasia_Studio_7.pdf

December 7, 2010 message from Mike Curtis

Mike Curtis, an employee of TechSmith, replied to Audio Without a Microphone in Camtasia Studio?, a question about TechSmith.
Good news! As someone who had to explain how to "trick" Windows or provide various levels of work-arounds if one wanted to record their system audio (sound from the speakers) I was so excited when CS version 7.0 made it easy. Check out the 1:10 section of this video: http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtas.. 

If you have Windows XP though, you may still have issues and have to do it "the old way" depending on your sound card.

Camtasia for Mac also makes it easy to capture system audio.

Bob Jensen's Codec Saga: How I Lost a Big Part of My Life's Work
Until My Friend Rick Lillie Solved My Problem
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

The full essay below is on the Web at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/VideoCodecProblems.htm

There are many newer 64-bit Windows 7 computers that will not playback videos compressed on computers such as my 32-bit Windows XP computer. Give your 64-bit computer a test. The most popular video I ever produced is my 133ex05a.wmv video that's still being downloaded by thousands of security analysts and auditors. Even before I purchased a new computer I was getting complaints that this video would not play on 64-bit Windows 7 computers.

Give your computer test by trying to playback the 133ex05a.wmv video at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/

Playback problems are also arising in videos created by millions of people other than me, especially Camtasia videos produced on 32-bit computers. The trouble is that Microsoft's set of codecs embedded in Windows 7 leaves out some important codecs in earlier versions of Windows.Many high level tech support groups still don't know how to solve this problem. For example, two days ago three Level 2 experts in the Dell Technical Support Division did not have a clue on how to solve the problem. Even though the video above would not run on my various video players such as Windows Media Player, VLC Player, Realtime, and Quicktime, Dell Level 2 technicians suggested I try three other players. None of these players corrected my problem.

Codec --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
Warning: There are many outfits on the Web that offer free or fee downloads of codecs. Don't trust any of them unless somebody you really trust informs you that these downloads are safe. Many of codec downloads carry malware malicious code that will put such things as Trojan horse viruses into your computer. One outfit even claims to playback virtually all videos without using a codec. I don't trust this company enough to even try its download. Quite a few people have downloaded the K-Lite Codec Pack, but my Sophos Security blocker would not allow this download. Friends who have the K-Lite does tell me that they still can't run many older videos in 64-bit machines that will run in 32-bit computers.

To make a long story short, a technical support expert named Ian at California State University in San Bernardino proposed a solution to the problem at the behest of my good friend and education technology expert Professor Rick Lillie.

On Thanksgiving Day Rick sent the following recommendation:

The problem is specifically an audio codec that did not come with Windows 7. Ian found a trustworthy place which provides that particular codec:
http://www.voiceage.com/acelp_eval_eula.php

Trinity University requires that I honor a relatively tough Cisco Systems security barrier called Sophos if I want to run my files on servers at Trinity. The VoiceAge download mentioned above not only passed through my Sophos barrier, unlike the K-Lite Codec Pack, the download took place in the blink of an eye.

Now old videos play wonderfully on my new 64-bit Windows 7 laptop from Dell. However, this is a limited solution in that users around the world who do not know about this solution or an equivalent solution will either not be able to run many old videos or they will be clogging my email box. I am asking that all of you inform your tech support group about this solution. I informed the Dell Support Group.

A better solution for my hundreds of videos still being served up on the Web would take weeks of my time. Windows 7 OS 64-bit computers will play my huge uncompressed avi files that I store in my barn. It is out of the question to serve up enormous avi files that can be compressed into files that save over 90% of of storage and transmission size. However, I did experiment with recompressing a couple of avi files on my 64-bit machine. These files will playback in wmv, rm, swf, and mov formats using only Windows 7 codecs. But at this stage of my life I don't want to spend weeks of my time solving a problem that Microsoft could solve with little cost or trouble.

Why compress raw avi videos into compressed wmv, mov, mpg, rm, scf, or some other compressed versions?

Continued in the full essay at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/VideoCodecProblems.htm

• Bob Jensen's Video Helpers (including how to capture and send streaming media)

• How can you capture and send streaming media?
  Answer --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia

   

• Review of video streaming software --- http://www.homeofficereports.com/streaming video.htm
   Scroll down to the table of software options and ratin

• Listing of Free Videos  
  There are both RealMedia and Windows Media File versions, but I highly recommend that users download the Windows Media File wmf versions.

  • Video Tutorials for Excel and MS Access --- http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/ExcelMain.htm
    Also see Getting Started With Excel --- http://www.studyfinance.com/lessons/excel/index.mv
     

  • Video Tutorial on Camtasia --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/
    See Amy Dunbar's updated video --- http://users.business.uconn.edu/adunbar/camtasia/intro_CamtasiaV5.html
    Scorm Testing in Moodle --- http://tracker.moodle.org/jiratest/browse/MDL?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project%3Achangelog-panel  
    Camtasia for a Mac --- http://visuallounge.techsmith.com/

    A 2005 version of Camtasia includes the ability to feed video camera footage into your videos of computer screen images.  Other new features are described at http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/comingsoon.asp

    I think Camtasia is a valuable aid for teaching technical material outside the classroom.  However, after using the Camtasia Recorder, you should compress your files using the Camtasia Producer (see Tip 2 below).

    Tip 1 of the Day for Camtasia Users:  Definitely Pan

    For those of you who view my earlier video tutorials, you might note that the viewing screen was not the full screen of my computer.  The viewing area remained a fixed region.  If I had simply chosen the panning option this problem could have been avoided.

    It is also possible to avoid this problem by choosing to capture full screen video, but this results in needlessly large files to store and download. 

    The better solution is to capture only a portion of the screen (by choosing the menu option Capture, Input, Region and dragging your mouse over the size region that you like).  But then go to the menu option (Effects, Zoom & Pan, AutoPan) and choose to autopan so that your fixed region follows your mouse pointer anywhere on the screen. 

    I wish I had autopanned my earlier video tutorials online.

    My latest tutorials are much improved with autopanning.  You can find examples at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/fas133/WindowsMedia/   

    The fee version of Camtasia Studio from TechSmith is described (with my video tutorial) at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm

    The Camtasia Studio link is http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp

    Camtasia produces avi files of computer screen action with audio included from your microphone dialog.  There is also software to compress these avi files into wmv, rm, and

  Camtasia 4
  And another important new feature of Camtasia 4 – you can create Camtasia VIDEOS of your lectures in Ipod format. So the students can now study 24x7, wherever they are!
  Richard Campbell, October 3, 2006

   

---

myMISlab is a web-based tutorial tool

I generally avoid posting advertisements unless I think a large number of readers have a particular interest in the product or service.

Pearson's myMISlab is a web-based tutorial tool that integrates business applications with Microsoft Office—including Excel, Access, and SharePoint — http://www.mymislab.com/tt_training.asp

Jensen Comment
When I taught AIS or MIS, I always insisted that student learn how to use MS Access so they better understand relational database systems. myMISlab could be greatly improved with tutorials for MS Access, although such tutorials are widely available elsewhere, including in the MS Access software itself. I provide ree video helpers for MS Access at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

PQQ stands for Possible Quiz Question material.

---

At Long Last:  Camtasia for a Mac --- http://visuallounge.techsmith.com/
I love Camtasia for Windows --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/

 

---

Illustration of a Great Tutorial Site That Relies Heavily on Camtasia videos ---
http://www.bionicturtle.com/

April 26, 2010 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

David Harper has built an excellent site providing study materials for finance certification exams. He relies heavily on Camtasia videos.

http://www.bionicturtle.com/
 
Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Here's a free sample (recommended by Amy Dunbar).
"How to use Excel’s LINEST() function to return multivariate regression - 10 min. screencast," by David Harper, Bionic Turtle, April 28, 2010 ---
http://www.bionicturtle.com/learn/article/how_to_use_excels_linest_function_to_return_multivariate_regression_10_min_/

Scroll down to watch the Camtasia video

Bob Jensen's Free Accounting Tutorials Using Camtasia Videos ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
 

It’s amazingly easy to use Camtasia Studio from TechSmith ---
http://www.techsmith.com/

 

---

SmartPen --- http://www.livescribe.com/smartpen/index.html

How To Pencast Demos --- http://math247.pbworks.com/How-to-embed-a-pencast-into-a-PBWiki-page

LiveScribe Featured Files ---
http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/CommunityOverviewPage

Note the file on carbon bonding (as an illustration) ---
http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=vnVdHtpPCGdL

Watch a Pencast video of simple algebra --- http://www.pencasts.org/blog/?p=32

Jing (but not Jing Pro) is free software for recording video from your computer screen such as SmartPen movements with capturing of your audio narrations --- http://www.techsmith.com/
Scroll your pointer over the left side to see product links (including Jing).

Screencast from TechSmith offers a limited amount of free space for storing and serving up your videos to the world ---
http://www.techsmith.com/
More space requires monthly rental fees.

 

---

Free Podcast Software

August 21, 2009 message from Rick Lillie [rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]

Hi Amy,

Do a Google search for “free podcasting software.”  You will discover a lot of free software programs that can produce podcast file formats.  Use the links below to learn more about podcasting and what it can do for course materials.

When you ask this question, you are sure to get a lot of different answers.  People who use podcasting as a way to share information tend to have a favorite software program.  The key to selecting a software program is to know upfront what you want to do with your recording (e.g., How do you want to share the recording?  Do you want the recording public or private?  Do you want students to download the recording and keep it?  Do you want students to only listen/view but not keep the file?).

Tablet PC computers are similar but quite different.  I use an IBM ThinkPad X61.  The “inking” technology works extremely well with the tablet’s features.  It has a fast processor, lots of RAM memory, and tons of disk space.  I have not found any multimedia software that did not perform well on the ThinkPad X61.  This is not the case with all brands of Tablet PCs.

During my 2009 CTLA presentation, I mentioned a great, inexpensive program called “PDF Annotator” (http://www.ograhl.com/en/pdfannotator/) that makes it possible to annotate and markup and create PDF files in ways that Adobe Acrobat Pro does not include.  I use PDF Annotator to grade papers and create graphics. 

VoiceThread (http://www.voicethread.com) is a hosted Web 2.0 service.  You do not need to upload the file before it can be accessed.  Uploading is done automatically for you by VoiceThread.  You create your presentation.  VoiceThread stores the file on its servers and then gives you a URL link to the file.  You can share the URL link with students.  Students can listen/view the presentation so long as they have internet access.  As I mentioned at my 2009 CTLA presentation, VoiceThread produces similar results to Camtasia, but does it in a different way, and in my opinion, is much easier to use.  Again, some people like Camtasia.  Some people prefer VoiceThread.

TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com) is a free, hosted Web 2.0 service similar to VoiceThread.  With TokBox, you can create a video message of up to 10 minutes in length.  A 10 minute streaming video is a “long” video for educational purposes.  TokBox gives you a URL to the video message that you can share with others.  TokBox also gives you html code that you can use to embed a player in a web page.  At 2009 CTLA, I explained how I embed a TokBox video message in a class assignments schedule.  I do this when I feel that a video commentary will provide a warmer connection with my students than printed text.

Uploading a file, whether MP3 or MP4 (or other file format) may be a little tricky depending upon the size of the file.  This is where “hosted” files make the creation/sharing process easier to use.  Be careful with using free hosting services, since many of them are always open to the world (i.e., “public”).  Do you really want your materials available to the “public?”  Sometimes, “public” files include material that may create a copyright issue.  Just be careful to consider these issues.

Hope this helps.

Rick Lillie
CalState San Bernardino

Email:  rlillie@csusb.edu

THREE RESOURCES FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

#1:  Podcasting in Plain English:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MSL42NV3c

#2:  About Audacity:  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/

#3:  Comparison of MP3 and MP4 file formats:  http://www.diffen.com/difference/Mp3_vs_Mp4

 

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YouTubeMP3
From the Scout Report on August 14, 2009

Free YouTube to MP3 Converter 3.2.1.58 ---  
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/free-dvd-video-software-download.htm

If you've ever wanted to just listen to a particular YouTube video at your leisure as a mp3 file, this application may be just the thing. Visitors simply need to install the program and drop the YouTube URLs in question into a box. The application will convert the files into the mp3 format. This version is compatible with computers running Windows XP or Vista.

Jensen Comment
I tried this and my first saved file was a  MP3 file of Les Paul and Mary Ford
The full video file on YouTube is at
World is Waiting for the Sunrise --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iGXP_UBog4 

I pasted the above URL into the converter program and saved it to my hard drive as a MP3 file.
It saved as a 3,132 Kb compressed audio file that you can listen to at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/LesPaulWaitingForSunrise.mp3

It's neat the way the program can download in background from YouTube. This way you can start a download and then go about your business in other software. Your computer will give a tiny bleep when the download is finished. If you then download another file, be sure to first change the "Output" file name so as to not write over the previous download file.

A clear advantage to saving YouTube audio or video is that these links come and go on YouTube all the time. The above link to the Les Paul and Mary Ford video might even have been removed between now and when I pasted the above link into this document. But my MP3 recording is now subject to my control, although care must be taken with respect to copyrights. I assumed that this demo will not upset anybody. U.C. Berkeley and other universities who put full length lectures and courses on YouTube encourage users to download the audio or video files (the video takes up an enormous amount of file space).

Another advantage is that you easily edit the MP3 file and/or make clipped portions to be saved as other audio files. For example, a six-minute clip might be saved from a 75-minute YouTube lecture from MIT.

I was amazed at the ease with which YouTube audio can be captured and saved as a file on my hard drive. When it’s audio that’s more important than video of a talking head or unneeded viewing of music performers, there is a great savings in storage requirements for audio files versus video files. This includes the wasted space of talking heads in videos and the desire to hear music without necessarily always having to watch it performed while you are playing it in background.

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Librarian Pro 1.4.4 --- http://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro.php 

This application is a nice way to create an organized and cross-referenced catalog for books, movies, and music. Visitors can keep track of loaned material, and they can easily import detailed cataloging information from popular sites like Amazon. Also, the application allows users to export these lists onto iPod and other such devices. This version can be used for fifteen days at no cost, and it is compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer and those running Max OS X 10.4 and newer.

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"On Its Third Try, Microsoft Finally Gets the Video Editor Right," by Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post, August 30, 2009 --- Click Here

Microsoft has a sometimes-undeserved reputation for needing three tries to get a product right, but in the case of Windows Movie Maker that description seems fair.

Movie Maker began life as a largely ignored part of Windows Millennium Edition and wasn't much better when XP arrived -- it couldn't even burn a DVD of your footage, instead limiting you to a proprietary, soon-abandoned multimedia disc format. Its Windows Vista incarnation added DVD output but offered little help with publishing videos online.

But Microsoft's new Windows Live Movie Maker ( http://download.live.com/moviemaker ) represents a genuine advance. The barely changed name understates how little this program -- a free download for Windows Vista and its upcoming replacement, Windows 7, but not Windows XP -- shares with older Movie Maker releases. It leaves out some features of its predecessors, incorporates a rewritten interface and adds a far more useful set of video-sharing options.

It also has a few bugs -- but they're nothing Microsoft can't fix in a maintenance release or three.

Live Movie Maker's installation experience, unfortunately, ranks among them. Getting this program requires downloading a Windows Live Installer setup utility that comes preset to install Microsoft's entire suite of Live software -- nine applications on a Vista laptop. Unless you opt out, installing Movie Maker will also switch your browser's search engine to Microsoft's Bing (a decent alternative to Google) and change its home page to MSN.com ( a decent way to remember how bad "portal sites" looked in 1999).

Movie Maker's installer didn't remove an old version of the program on that Vista laptop, but at least nobody will confuse the two. Where the prior release employs a conventional menu-and-toolbar interface, Live Movie Maker adopts the "ribbon" style of Microsoft's Office 2007, in which one large toolbar reveals different functions as you select tabs -- Home, Animations, Visual Effects and so on -- at the top of the window.

Many Office 2007 users say they hate the ribbon, but here it seems to work, presenting the program's features in manageable subsets.

Live Movie Maker can open video clips and photos already saved on your computer, or you can use Windows Live Photo Galley -- installed alongside Live Movie Maker even if you select only the video editor -- to import them from a camera or camcorder.

Microsoft advertises that in Windows 7, you will also be able to grab video from a Flip camcorder or an iPhone, but I had no problem pulling in clips from a Flip UltraHD and an iPhone 3GS in Vista. Yet on a computer running an almost-final version of 7, I couldn't play footage from either device, apparently because of a conflict with a Pinnacle digital TV program.

Live Movie Maker presents these clips as a series of thumbnails of varying length. You can flip any of them 90 degrees (helpful if you held a digital camera on its side when recording video), easily split or trim them, and rearrange their order before adding title screens, captions, closing credits and any of dozens of Hollywood-style transitions. If you're assembling a slideshow, you can apply fancy visual treatments and Ken Burns-style panning effects to your photos. And you can pick out a soundtrack, then have the program adjust the movie's duration to match the music's play time.

If you're in a hurry, you can just pick a song and click the AutoMovie button to have Live Movie Maker do the rest of the work for you.

But unlike older Movie Maker releases, this version doesn't record voice-over narrations. And unlike such non-free video editors as Apple's iMovie, it can't sharpen a grainy shot or stabilize a jittery clip.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It still doesn’t beat grapefruit.

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Internet users can view video either as video file downloads (that may or may not be stored on a hard drive) or as streaming video (that does not entail downloading a media file but can be captured with streaming media software).

Update from the AAA Accounting Commons --- http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
I thank Rick for sharing his expertise in the new VoiceThread multimedia education and communication technology.
Accounting Professor Rick Lillie Uses VoiceThread to Create Streaming Video --- http://iaed.wordpress.com/
 

If you have not yet discovered VoiceThread, I strongly recommend that you click on the link below and explore the VoiceThread website. You are in for a real technology treat!

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VOICETHREAD WEBSITE

I use VoiceThread to create streaming video lectures, to create tutorials explaining how to solve problems, to explain answers to quiz and examination questions, and more. VoiceThread is easy to use, is similar to PowerPoint (but much more robust), and is web-hosted which makes it easy for you to share VoiceThread presentations with your students and colleagues.

During a presentation that I gave at the recent 2008 American Accounting Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, I talked about VoiceThread. To help participants to see how easy it is to create and share dynamic presentations with VoiceThread, I put together a short presentation that explains how to use VoiceThread. Click on the link below to view the short tutorial program.

Click here to view a short tutorial program explaining how to use VoiceThread

 

I encourage you to sign up for a free account.  Learn to use VoiceThread.  If you like what you create, then you can upgrade to the “Pro” version, which is very inexpensive. To get the full benefit of using VoiceThread, you need a headset/microphone and webcam.  To begin, use the tools included in VoiceThread. If you have questions about VoiceThread, use the “Contact Me” option on the right side of the screen.  Send me a message.  Include your email and/or telephone number.  I will be happy to work with you.

Enjoy!
Rick Lillie

Jensen Comment
VoiceThread has an advantage in allowing a community of users to comment (in multimedia) comments on an instructional video.
It's drawback is that it uses a lot of storage and bandwidth for talking heads.

Some VoiceThread pricing information is given at http://voicethread.com/pricing/pro/
It is possible to get small amounts of video file storage free, but it can get really expensive when the community goes on and on with long commentaries.
In the pro version, file sizes are limited to 100 Mb. This is about one tenth the size of a 10 minute YouTube video. YouTube generally limits file sizes to 1 Gb or 10 minutes of compressed video such as mpg compression --- http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=57924
Colleges can stream much larger videos on YouTube such as the courses that UC Berkeley makes available on YouTube with over one hour of video for each lecture in a course.

VoiceThread makes it possible to have somewhat longer videos in a 100 Mb file by using small video screens. Note how Rick does this at http://voicethread.com/#q.b173180.i923368

YouTube also allows any users to comment in text format such that commentaries can accompany videos on YouTube. The huge advantage of YouTube is that videos can be uploaded, viewed, and even downloaded for free. VoiceThread, for an annual fee, has more features.

Although I've not tried VoiceThread, it would seem that cost and file size limits make this less attractive than YouTube.

Other video streaming alternatives are summarized at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia

Camtasia users should note that TechSmith will serve up streaming videos in a utility called ScreenCast --- http://www.techsmith.com/screencast.asp

You can read the following at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia

However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the term loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that case the video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for such purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia Recorder --- http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for streaming video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.

 

Other streaming media alternatives are summarized at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia

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Advanced video production for your touch screen computer or mobile---
Http://www.touchcast.com
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up on March 22, 2014.

So if you have an IPad, go to the above link to view their sample content.
Also you can download the free app to create content on your IPad.

From the Scout Report on October 2, 2015

KeepVid --- http://keepvid.com/ 

The premise of KeepVid could not be simpler. Just copy and paste a link from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, DailyMotion, and other supported sites and select Download. The program then downloads the video or audio onto the user's computer free of charge. While KeepVid is safe and legal, readers will want to be careful about how they use their downloaded content. For instance, downloading the latest Taylor Swift video to one's computer is legal. However, using that video for profit or any public purpose is usually a violation of copywrite laws. Nevertheless, for readers who would like to download their favorite videos from YouTube and other sites, KeepVid is an excellent resource.

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From the Scout Report on August 7, 2009

HardCopy Pro 3.0.11  --- http://www.desksoft.com/HardCopy.htm 

HardCopyPro is a screen-capture tool, but it has some nice bells and whistles that make it worth a closer look. Visitors can use the tabbed dialog box interface to pick images or even capture images at set time intervals. Also, users can preset the program to capture a certain rectangle, window, full screen, or even the window located under the mouse cursor. This version is free for 30 days, and it is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.

Statement from the Company
 HardCopy Pro is the professional, easy to use screen capture utility for Windows. It can capture rectangular screen areas and whole windows. The captured images can be cropped very easily and the color depth can be changed to any desired value from monochrome to true color. Images can be printed, saved, copied to the clipboard, emailed, edited with any image editing program, etc. Many options allow the customization of all these actions to individual user needs.

Jensen Comment
I downloaded this (temporarily free) program by clicking on Downloads and then choosing HardCopy Pro. I first saved the zip file in a Temp folder and then unzipped the file under Program Files.
The download link is at http://www.desksoft.com/HardCopy_Download.htm

The free download version only lasts 30 days, but you can purchase the software for $20 such that there’s no big investment here if you like the program. After about 20 days of playing around with this I will probably buy the software for $20. The price may be slightly higher since 2009.

I also Camtasia Producer  ( http://www.techsmith.com/  )  to capture video screens. But Camtasia is more expensive, has no timer, and I’ve never been able to get it to work for streaming video (YouTube) as opposed to video files such as mpg or wmv files. I am not, however, using the latest version of Camtasia.

HardCopy Pro will not copy video screens and save them to picture files. Nor will it capture "rolling screens" that must be scrolled to see the full document or spreadsheet.

I also use Camtasia SnagIt ( http://www.techsmith.com/  ) for screen captures. One advantage of SnagIt is that it will capture rolling screens such as a text document or spreadsheet that will not all fit on one screen. But I’ve not had any success using SnagIt to capture video of any kind. SnagIt seems to capture the screen but will not save it as a picture file that I can edit. However, I’m not running the latest version of SnagIt.

Bob Jensen

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August 31, 2008 reply from Rick Lillie at the AAA Accounting Commons --- http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home

Hi Bob,

Thank you for your comments about VoiceThread.  I would like to expand on several points that you raised.

Regarding the way VoiceThread works

VoiceThread is a hosted service that can be used in a variety of ways.  For example, VoiceThread may be used to create

• a digital discussion board where comments may be made in text, audio, or video formats.
• streaming audio commentaries (e.g., streaming lectures, tutorials and personalized feedback to students).
• streaming video commentaries (e.g., steaming lectures, tutorials, and personalized feedback to students).

Currently, VoiceThread is offered in both free and low-fee options.  The pricing screen needs a little more explanation.

• When using the "free" version, you are limited to three active VoiceThread programs (files) at any given time.  If you need to go beyond three active VoiceThread files, simply delete one or replace it with the new program.
• The file size and time limitations apply to EACH VoiceThread program created.  This is not an overall limitations (e.g., for all three VoiceThread programs if you use the "free" version).
• The "Pro" version is extremely generous in that you can create an unlimited number of VoiceThread programs during a subscription year, with each file including up to 500 slides and being up to 100 MB in size.
• You create your slides on your own computer and then upload them into VoiceThread.  Once uploaded, this is where the production process takes place.  Commenting on individual slides is done online through the VoiceThread interface screen.  You control
  • how your VoiceThread will be made available to viewers (i.e., public or private).
  • whether viewers can post reply comments to individual slides within the program.
  • whether individual slides may be downloaded.

• The VoiceThread file is condensed which reduces overall file size for a VoiceThread program.

Pros vs Cons of VoiceThread

• VoiceThread recognizes the need to maintain privacy of materials created for use within a learning environment (i.e., face-to-face, blended, or online classroom setting).  You control who may view a VoiceThread.  While a VoiceThread may be viewed through VoiceThread's social network (i.e., visable to everyone), you may limit viewing.  This is important with respect to satisfying "fair use" of copyrighted materials.
• VoiceThread is extremely easy to use as compared to other software programs (e.g., Camtasia).
• To create a streaming video VoiceThread, all you need is your computer, an internet connection, a headset/microphone, and a webcam.  If you do not have a headset/microphone, you can use a telephone to record the audio track.
• VoiceThread does not currently meet all ADA (Sect. 508) requirements.  However, the developers have said that VoiceThread is expected to be fully ADA compliant by early to mid-2009.
• VoiceThread does not currently include a closed-captioning option.  YouTube announced yesterday (8/30/08) that it has added a closed-captioning feature for use with videos uploaded to YouTube.
• VoiceThread includes a feature that the other software programs do not include.  VoiceThread makes it possible to annotate a slide while the program is being recorded.  All other programs record static slides and attach an audio and/or video track to the slide.  The capturing of the live annotation adds a "warmth" to the delivery of the content that brings the student's learning experience closer to what would be experienced in a live, face-to-face classroom.  I have found that this "single feature" improves the learning experience for students, especially when used in blended and online learning settings.

IN CLOSING

There are lots of ways to create rich-media instructional materials.  I use them extensively in my accounting courses.

Personally, I do not like Camtasia, Adobe Presenter, Camtasia Recorder and similar software programs.  For me, these programs are too complex to use.  I like processes to be as simple as possible.  This is why I prefer VoiceThread.

VoiceThread allows me to focus on creating the slides, pictures (jpeg files), Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, etc., that I want to include in a streaming presentation.  VoiceThread makes it easy to go from slides to streaming video with embedded commentary.  VoiceThread saves the file and gives me a URL to the program or the html code for embedding a player into course materials.

The overall process is simple and easy to use.

Many accounting faculty that I have talked with seem hesitant to include technology in their courses and to use technology tools when creating course materials.  When I find something that will make life easier, I share the information.

Thank you for your comments.  I enjoy this type of discussion.

Best wishes,

Rick Lillie

August 31,  2008 reply from Bob Jensen at the AAA Accounting Commons --- http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home

Hi Rick,

I  really appreciate your detailed elaboration on video creation alternatives. Thank you so much! Please keep them coming at the AAA Commons. You obviously have unique technology skills.

The one area where I disagree with you is on Camtasia. I personally learned how to use Camtasia in less than an hour and then recorded many technical videos for my students to use outside the classroom. It cut down on the traffic through my office door by about 95% from students who just did follow the technical details in class. More importantly these videos (especially the ones about MS Access technicalities) helped me explain things that I forgot how to do over time. Examples of my Camtasia videos can be found at the following links:

ACCT 5342 (AIS videos) --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

ACCT 5341 (Accounting Theory videos) at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/ 

I even prepared a tutorial on how to record (capture) computer image videos and produce (compress) them into smaller files for storage and delivery --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/
(I suggest clicking on the CamtasiaTutorial.wmv file)

I hope accounting professors and students will not be scared away from Camtasia before even trying it out. A limited and free version may be attempted first. It is called Jing --- http://www.jingproject.com/ 

But an even better suggestion is to download Camtasia Studio itself on a free trial basis --- http://www.jingproject.com/ 

Another interesting product from TechSmith is called UserView. Suppose a student is located somewhere else in the world. UserView allows a professor to both see and record what is happening on a student's computer screen such that the professor can analyze the moves and suggest to the student how to do something better. Similarly, the student can see what is happening on a professor's computer while he/she narrates.  Good stuff --- http://www.techsmith.com/uservue.asp 

But for me, the best thing since grapefruit is Camtasia Studio for producing videos for my own servers, YouTube, and possibly even VoiceThread. For YouTube I suggest choosing mpg compressions after recording a wmv video.

Bob Jensen's video helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm

Thanks Rick,

Bob Jensen

 

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Excel Helpers

CORRECT THE SYNTAX ERRORS
"How to debug Excel spreadsheets," Rayman Meservy and Marshall Romney, Journal of Accountancy, November 1, 2015 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2015/nov/how-to-debug-excel-spreadsheets.html

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"How to Maximize Excel's Recent Items Menu," AccountingWeb, August 2013 (registration required) ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/how-maximize-excels-recent-items-menu/222214?source=technology

Excel guru David Ringstrom is back with another informative article about how to streamline the process of accessing recent spreadsheets. He explains the process not for just one version of Excel, but for Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013. Also in today's news is coverage of the 2013 Family Office Exchange's recent survey – Benchmarking: Technology in the Family Office. Single and multifamily offices were surveyed on their technology practices, including their software selections, security, budgeting, staffing, and use of Cloud computing.

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"The First 8 Excel Tricks You Have To Learn On The Way To Becoming A Master," by Walter Hickey, Business Insider, July 10, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/excel-countif-sum-functions-if-sumproduct-dollar-sign-2013-7

"How To Use Index/Match, The One Microsoft Excel Trick That Separates The Gurus From The Interns," by Walter Hickey, Business Insider, July 11, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/excel-index-match-2013-7 

We've been writing a lot about Microsoft Excel formulas.

The program is the gold standard of programs. It's elegant, ubiquitous, and outstandingly powerful.

American business lives and dies by the spreadsheet, and everyone is always looking to hone their skills.

There's one trick, though, that separates the quants from the interns.

That trick is Index/Match, a function that can find any value in any spreadsheet.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/excel-index-match-2013-7?op=1#ixzz2Ypc1HDwB

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's Excel helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm

 

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"The Risk of Using Spreadsheets for Statistical Analysis," CFO.com Whitepaper, 2012 ---
http://www.cfo.com/whitepapers/index.cfm/displaywhitepaper/14668959?mid=107705&rid=107705.59400.30390

Abstract:

While spreadsheets are widely used for statistical analysis, they are useful only to a certain point. When used for a task they?re not designed to perform, or for a task beyond the limit of their capabilities, using spreadsheets can be risky. Read this paper to learn about more powerful yet easy-to-use analytics alternatives that may be more suitable.

Bob Jensen's sadly neglected Excel tutorials ---
See Below

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Interactive Mulitmedia Excel Files on the Web

Richard Campbell's Interactive Invoice --- http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell/gp10_windows/engage.html

I thank Richard for showing us how to add online interactive hotspots to a picture. This is part of the way toward interaction. A file may become more fully interactive if it is an Excel file rather than just a picture or a non-interactive video.

Since your computer can be set to download Excel files into your Web browser for security purposes, it is possible to download Excel files with interactive hot spots. In addition, numbers can be changed such that there is calculation interaction as well. Such calculation interaction is not available in pictures.

I illustrate an interactive multimedia Excel file at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/ExcelMediaIllustrations/Example01.xls
This will download very slowly because of the media files linked in the Excel file are also being downloaded.

The steps I follow when making interactive multimedia Excel files are as follows:

1. Prepare an Excel spreadsheet
2. Add Web links and make them active
3. Decide where to place audio clips
4. Record each audio clip as a wav file (I use the free Audacity software) --- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
   I save these files in the same folder as the Excel spreadsheet
5. In Excel click on (Insert, Object) and choose Media Clip
   Then choose (Insert Media File, Sound) and find the appropriate wav file
6. You can also insert video clips (I record these in Camtasia)

Note that you can compress wav audio files into mp3 files and avi video files into whatever format you choose such as wmv, mov, or mpg. Adding any media to an Excel spreadsheet makes downloading slower. Media file compression, however, speeds up the process greatly if you have long media clips in your spreadsheet.

There are of course other files that you can add to Excel such as pictures.

Any downloaded MS Office file loses macro functionality in a Web browser, so you might want to avoid using macros in your Excel file.

It is also possible to add DHTML dynamic interactions to Excel files. This adds an immense amount of code to your file, and the DHTML code cannot be read on all types of browsers. I have a video on how to do DHTML interaction in Excel at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/ExcelDHTML.wmv
However, I don't view this rather complex procedure important since it became possible to read downloaded Excel files directly into a Web browser and thereby avoid many of the security risks of running Excel files in Excel itself.

Bob Jensen's threads on tricks and tools of the trade are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

 

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Questions
How can you turn your email messages into free video messages?
How can you video conference calls?

For those of you in the American Accounting Association, I call your attention to a new Teaching Resource called TokBox submitted to the Commons by accounting professor Rick Little. You do not need to go to the Commons for some of Rick’s links passed on below. I thank Rick for sharing this teaching resource.

 AAA Members

Please go to the AAA Commons at least once each day --- http://commons.aaahq.org
For Teaching and Research Resources, Click on the menu bar item called “Roles”
Rick’s posting is called “Thinking Outside the Box”
You might want to clidk on Rick’s picture to see his interesting profile (e.g., with Grant Thornton and as a local CPA before getting his PhD in accounting)

 

Links for Non-Members

Rick’s TokBox Blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/using-tokbox-to-communicate-with-your-students/

Rick’s introductory video is at http://www.tokbox.com/vm/b056ued8rnau#vmail=b056ued8rnau

The TokBox homepage is at http://www.tokbox.com/#

Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here's how it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat.

This is an innovative idea for conferencing, letting your parents see their grandchildren, and motivating students. From a societal standpoint it may be a waste of bandwidth for sending videos of talking heads across the Internet.

 

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YouTube versus Viddler versus Other Online Video Sources

July 19, 2008 message from Richard J. Campbell mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Although youtube has a huge "market share", the quality of videos are degraded by the compression techniques that they use. Below is a link to a demo of another, better-quality site.

http://www.viddler.com/learn-more/ 

Richard J. Campbell
 mailto:campbell@rio.edu

July 20, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Richard,

Thank you for the Viddler link. I looked into this a bit and discovered that Viddler is more for the short home movies. As you know as well or better than me, video file compression is essential to making online video work well, especially since online video is beginning to clog the Internet. If I were an Internet czar I would ban uncompressed video.

Internet Gridlock Video is clogging the Internet
Video downloads are sucking up bandwidth at an unprecedented rate. A short magazine article might take six minutes to read online. Watching "The Evolution of Dance" also takes six minutes--but it requires you to download 100 times as much data. "The Evolution of Dance" alone has sent the equivalent of 250,000 DVDs' worth of data across the Internet.
"Internet Gridlock Video is clogging the Internet.: How we choose to unclog it will have far-reaching implications," by Larry Hardesty, MIT's Technology Review, July/August 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20919/?nlid=1172&a=f

Uncompressed Viddler videos only run for a max of about a minute. This makes Viddler unsuitable for training and education tutorials and full lectures relative to YouTube where videos in mpg compression can run up to ten minutes each video we upload. YouTube also lets colleges put up entire lectures from universities. For example, one of UC Berkeley's YouTube lectures in physics that runs 1.25 hours is at http://snipurl.com/ucp01  [www_youtube_com] 

It would be absurd to put entire courses or even longer tutorials up in uncompressed video. Compression of a video can save upwards of 90% of the file space required for storage and uploading and downloading --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#Video

File size is limited on Viddler to 500 Mb in contrast to YouTube’s one Gb limit (usually uploaded in mpg compression) which gives about 10 minutes of viewing at 640 x 480 resolution on YouTube for the general public. UC. Universities like UC Berkeley that put lots of free courses on YouTube must be making special arrangements to have file sizes of 10 GB or more per lesson.

The allowed video time on Viddler is just not good for tutorials. By way of illustration, compare the following tutorials in math and especially compare the image quality versus the running time versus the loading time:

• Viddler    (1.1 minute tutorial) ---  http://www.youtube.com/t/yt_handbook_produce#
• YouTube (5.2 minute tutorial) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRawnUv-gL8
• YouTube (8.3 minute tutorial) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRawnUv-gL8
• YouTube (4.3 minute tutorial) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx5KDyvlG3Q  (humor rip off)

You can view YouTube videos in full screen mode using one button on the bottom left. Viddler videos can also be viewed in full screen by first clicking on the menu button on the bottom left and then choosing the full screen option

Viddler --- http://www.viddler.com/
YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/

Bob Jensen's video helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#Video

Bob Jensen's guide to free video lectures --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

BigThink:  YouTube for Scholars (where intellectuals may post their lectures on societal issues) --- http://www.bigthink.com/

TED:  Technology, Entertainment, and Design Lectures --- http://www.ted.com/

Open Science Directory --- http://www.opensciencedirectory.net/

Free Feature Length Documentary Films --- http://www.snagfilms.com/ 

The Visual Dictionary --- http://www.infovisual.info/

 

---

Bob Jensen's Tips on Capturing and Presenting Online Video Lessons

June 30, 2008 message from Glen L Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

I have philosophical questions regarding online tutoring.

I just returned from the 3-day AIS Educators Conference in Colorado. While there, I participated in a 1-hours hands-on session on using Camtasia to create on-line tutorial materials. I was impressed with the program's ability to produce the materials--and produce almost any output format.

Here are my questions:

My core IS class meets twice a week for 15 weeks. So, we have 30 75-class meetings. About 6 (20%) of those class meetings are used to explain how to do 3 hands-on projects. So, lets say I put all the material for those 6 classes online using Camtasia, then do I do about the 6 class meetings that I free up?

If fill those 6 class meetings with more stuff (2 more chapters or other readings), it seems that one could argue that I have expanded by class to the equivalent of 18 weeks (15 weeks of in-class meetings plus 3 weeks of online class "meetings").

The opposite approach would be to not have the 6 in-class meetings at all because I now have 6 online class meetings. But what would my chair and/dean think of this? Or will it be easy to convince them that this approach (not having 6 in-class meetings) is a move toward online courses, which is a goal of our university?

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA Accounting & Information Systems, COBAE California State University, Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372 818.677.3948 818.677.2461 (messages)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f

July 1, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

So I don't forget while typing this, my best tip for Camtasia recording is to learn to use the Pause/Record options (in my case I toggle the F9 key). That way you can pause recording, take a break, prep for the next module, and then start to record again. Unless you tell the viewers that you paused, they won't even know you took a break.

I always used Camtasia modules for students to use outside of class. I rarely used these inside class unless it was something I might screw up live (especially when teaching some MS Access modules).

 Camtasia worked great in relieving student frustration about not understanding or remembering all aspects of a one-time presentation in class. It surely gave me more free time, because students had much less need to come to my office to get me to repeat something technical.

 I have many hours of Camtasia video that I recorded, much of which is no longer online. One thing you have to consider when you really get serious is that video, even when tightly compressed with Camtasia Producer, still takes a lot of storage space. Instructors seldom have such space on Blackboard or WebCT servers. Trinity was very generous with me with respect to Web server space, but I felt guilty about taking too much video storage advantage of this generosity. I was saved by my really good friends in the Computer Science Department who seemed to have no problems will providing me with video serving.

 For illustrative purposes you can also view the following modules online:
I suggest viewing the wmv compressed file extensions.

 ACCT 5342 (AIS) --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

 ACCT 5341 (Accounting Theory) --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/

Some tutorials --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/

Where can Camtasia be improved?
I think the biggest improvement would be to capture audio from something other than a microphone in front of speakers. For example, for my technology road shows I like to capture video from online sources like TechSmith itself. That way I can easily show parts of longer video streams. The visual parts of video capturing video seem to work quite well but the audio capturing generally sucks. I wish Camtasia had an option for capturing video directly rather than through the speakers.

You can find some video capturing of video examples in some of my road show files at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/Video/
For example, note the Interactive Video module and the PodcastVodcast module.

Note the poor sound of my captured Techsmith videos. This illustrates how Camtasia could be improved with an option to record video internally without having to hold a microphone in front of the speakers.

Mostly we capture computer screens and narrate what we want to demo. When there is video of a talking head, don't sweat the lip sinking too much. To get lip sinking you have to capture at a very expensive (in terms of file size) frame capture rate. Camtasia allows you to increase this capture rate, but I highly, highly recommend sticking with the default capture rate. Lip sinking only matters in a 1955 Chevy at a drive-in movie.

Remember that my best tip for Camtasia recording is to learn to use the Pause/Record options (in my case I toggle the F9 key). That way you can pause recording, take a break, prep for the next module, and then start to record again. Unless you tell the viewers that you paused, they won't even know you took a break.

I have some tips on using Camtasia at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm

Bob Jensen

 

---

Lecture Capture Technology and Copyright Problems

July 28, 2008 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Another "hat" I wear is a beta tester for Techsmith.

They have just announced another new product called "Camtasia Relay Server" which is designed to facilitate the recording of lectures and surveys, primarily by non-techies and seamlessly upload that lecture to a web server, for rendering and serving up. See:

http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiarelay/sign-up/ 

My main concern - as I told Techsmith - is if the server is owned by the University, who owns the intellectual property rights to the professors' lectures??

Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu 

 

July 28, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Richard,

Copyright ownership rights vary from college to college. Some universities (I think South Dakota) even own the copyright to books that faculty write and all lectures. Other universities lay no claims to faculty creations except in the case of funded grants that significantly draw upon university resources such as science and medical labs. Generally colleges are more aggressive with faculty patents than they are with copyrights, but this varies greatly.

The place to start is the Faculty Handbook in your college or university which in most instances is now online (access may be restricted to faculty and staff). You might also check the student handbook regarding student rights to captured lectures, exams, etc. As Jagdish once pointed out to us, it’s not necessary that a copyright be registered for the “owner” of intellectual property to have copyright rights. It is wise to intellectual property right policy section of every syllabus.

The big issue is when students capture professors’ lectures (in video or audio) and then serve them up on any server (including YouTube). I suspect faculty or college administrators can actually sue students but this would probably be advised only when financial or health damages such as mental breakdown are substantial. Problems of having students capture and serve up lectures are as follows:

1 This is a form of plagiarism, but the lecturer or college itself must actually find that the lecture has been plagiarized and is being made available on some server. This in itself is difficult because the piece may keep popping up. For example, the same video of a Barbara Streisand singing “America” might appear on a dozen or more YouTube URLs. If notice is given to YouTube to cancel one URL, the video may appear on three new URLs the same day. Back where I grew up we just say “you can’t keep a prairie dog from poppin’ up in another hole and another and another and another and another.”
 

2. When there is a copyright violation (in hard copy or online) standard procedure is to request that the person cease and desist from making the material available. Generally this alone will make the violator cease and desist. The problem, however, is that hundreds of other users of the material by now may have their own copies and may themselves serve it up like an entire prairie dog colony in a pasture.

There’s a great deal of information about copyright infringement (including on YouTube) at http://www.howstuffworks.com/search.php?terms=copyright+violation&x=28&y=33

 

In terms of capturing lectures, Apple Corporation may give the Camtasia Relay Server a run for its money.

 

“Patent Filing Suggests Apple Is Exploring New Lecture-Capture Software,” by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3199/patent-filing-suggests-apple-is-exploring-new-lecture-capture-software

A patent application filed by an Apple employee details software that would capture video and slides from college lectures and automatically edit them into video podcasts.

The application, titled “Automatic Content Creation and Processing,” was unearthed this month by AppleInsider. The name on the patent application is Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. An Apple spokesman could not be reached for comment Monday, but the company is notoriously tight-lipped about products that are still in development.

Apple already runs a free service called iTunes U that helps colleges around the country manage online offerings, and several companies sell software that helps capture lecture video and slides as well. One unusual feature described in the new patent application, though, is the ability to determine automatically when to run video footage of the professor speaking and when to splice in images of lecture slides. As the patent application puts it, the software would determine “a time to switch the first and second streams from the event data.”

Many college officials are looking for easy ways to record large numbers of lectures and offer video or audio recordings to students. The goal is to capture and distribute lecture podcasts without requiring professors or other staff members to perform time-consuming editing or file management.

 

Bob Jensen's helpers on copyright issues are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

 

---

 

          Camtasia 5

New Camtasia Version 5 Features

September 30, 2007 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU] 

And here is the feature list of Camtasia's version 5:

I’ll have some demos of Camtasia version 5 output available soon.

FEATURE LIST:



RECORDER

*Simpler recording process

*Resizes applications

*Customizable recording toolbar: options to add markers and ScreenDraw



EDITING

Project settings -

*Gives you a real time preview of what your video will look like.

*Eg, you record at 1024x768, then set your project settings to Web.

It will scale your video to 640x480.



SmartFocus -

*Intelligently tracks activity on the screen and zooms in to keep

your viewers focused.

*We've also made Zoom n Pan a lot more flexible, so editing, adding

and removing zoom keyframes is way easier


Housekeeping -

*When saving a project, there's an option for copying or moving all

files associated with the project to a folder.

Transitions -

*New ones include: Fade through Black, Glow, Cube Rotate, Page Turn,

Peel, Roll


Callouts -

*We added a 3D edge effect to make the callouts standout more

Improved stability -

*Though its just one bullet item on here, about 1/3 of our

development effort has gone into shoring up the code, making it much

more stable and predictable

Editing at 30FPS -

*We've moved to a more standard, stable editing approach of 30 frames

per second editing. We initially followed Microsoft Movie Maker,

giving people the illusion of editing at 100ths of a second. But we

found that it actually confused people people, because we didn't have

100 frames per second. So now we've got 30 fps video and editing.

Nice and consistent and more stable.

 

 

No Multimedia Expertise Needed

• Record screen activity and narration
• Edit video and audio clips
• Add interactivity and callouts
• Deliver in all the popular video formats
• Share with CD and Web menus

---

 

Camtasia Tutorial Video:  How to make interactive Flash quizzes

October 31, 2007 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Below is a link to a movie about the above topic – SCORM is a protocol which dictates how a content authoring system interfaces with a learning management system like WebCT. You must have at least Camtasia version 4 to do this, but this movie was filmed in Camtasia version 5.

Not the controls in the lower right corner of the video – one toggles a popup menu, one goes full-screen and one info / copyright box.

http://www.virtualpublishing.net/scorm2/scorm2.html 

 

 

---

Yet Another Way to Send Large Files Across the Internet
This is important as we enter the era of sending students our Camtasia videos --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
My PowerPoint file on Camtasia is at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/

 

"Sending Large Files Down the Tubes:  Sharing Content Is Just a Drag And Drop Away," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal,  October 3, 2007; Page D8 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137101138247131.html

 

Too many times, I've shared a large batch of digital files with friends or family members only to realize that I included an unwanted photo or shared with someone accidentally. But once these documents are sent, they're out of my control and on a server somewhere being distributed via email or through a photo-sharing service. Making certain files private or changing who has access to those files is a complicated, time-consuming process.

 

This week, I tested another product in the long line of programs that uses automatic synchronization to simplify the process of sharing large files by giving you the ability to change files and privacy options at any time. It's called Tubes (www.tubesnow.com) from Tubes Networks and it takes its name from the pneumatic vacuum-tube system commonly used in bank drive-throughs that motivated me to join my Mom on visits to the bank as a kid. Mom would pull up and a container would whoosh over through a tube to arrive beside the car window; after a quick exchange it returned with her deposit slip and a lollipop for me. Tubes aims to work with the same sort of magic. Once installed, its desktop application stays opened on your computer as a place where "tubes" are made for sending files. Any type of file can be dragged, dropped and sent off to share with other people using these virtual tubes. As soon as you release data into a tube, a whoosh sounds (like that of the vacuum tube) and your files are encrypted and uploaded to the Tubes server. Invited guests view your tube's data in its full, uncompressed format. The owner of the tube always has the final say on what is shared with whom, and changes made to tubes on your hard drive are detected instantly via automatic synchronization, guaranteeing viewers will always see the latest version of the tube. Shared tubes are also accessible via the Web, saving viewers from downloading the Tubes desktop program. Other products like Sharpcast (www.sharpcast.com) and Pando (www.pando.com) also offer ways to share large digital files; Sharpcast uses synchronization similar to that of Tubes -- it all happens behind the scenes without any work on the user's part. Tubes is available in a free version that provides a gigabyte of storage, or in paid versions with five, 10 and 20 gigabytes of storage for $6, $11 or $21, respectively. Most of the time, Tubes worked well for me when I installed it on two Windows machines, one running XP and one running Vista. Tubes' smart use of an already familiar process -- dragging and dropping -- gives you the impression that you already know how to use it and makes sharing files seem easy. I started dragging all sorts of files into tubes that I created, naming them and labeling them with a representative icon (one of 10 offered by Tubes or one of my own images). For all its usefulness, Tubes certainly has room for improvement. For now, there isn't a Mac version of the program, and when friends and I tried accessing shared tubes using a Mac Web browser, the results were inconsistent and sometimes didn't work at all. Windows Vista had its own issues. After installing Tubes on my Vista laptop, an error message labeled "invalid argument" made me feel like a member of the debate team. And I couldn't see thumbnail images of photos in my tubes using Vista, though I could on Windows XP. Today, Tubes is releasing an updated version of its program that aims to improve the usability and look of the product, including refining the processes of sharing tubes and looking at tubes via the Web. Before sharing tubes, I adjusted the permissions granted to each guest by labeling them as a Reader, Author or Editor; only the Owner can invite others to view a tube. But these labels can get confusing. More than once, I granted guests the highest level of permission, which is Editor, allowing them to make changes to the files in my tube, only for the guest to be asked for his registered Tubes email and password, which an invited guest shouldn't need. The Tubes experience was best when the recipient of my Tubes invitations had the application installed on his or her desktop. After installing Tubes on a computer at work, I installed it on my home PC and easily auto-synched tubes that I created at work onto my home PC -- a big plus. Tubes incorporates the Web by assigning a unique URL to every file in every tube, and every tube automatically generates its own Web site, or "tubeSite," as it's called. Individual URLs for each file can be found by right clicking on a file and selecting an option to copy the URL into an email or browser. I copied the URL of a shared MP3 audio file and pasted it into my browser; it played a Fountains of Wayne song with no problem. But sharing these URLs with others is only possible if the owner gives permission. Comments about tubes can be made in the "tubeBlog" -- accessible through any tube in the application or online. I created a tubeBlog for a tube with photos from one of my vacations, adding descriptions and comments to specific photos. Others, with my permission, could do the same, using the photos from the tube or just leaving comments. A friend used Tubes to share photos with me while vacationing in Italy and Amsterdam. I added my own travel photos and an itinerary made in Microsoft Word to his tube and changed the tube's title; these alterations synched instantly. Even if you aren't online, you can access tubes or make changes to them by dragging files in or taking them out; updates are made automatically the next time your computer connects to the Web. Tubes is off to a good start, but it needs to improve its system to make permission levels more understandable for tube owners and those invited to see a shared tube. With a few improvements, Tubes could be a product that I'll continue using on Windows computers long after this column. Continued in article

 

Bob Jensen's threads on competing alternatives for sending huge files (many of them free) are at
 http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#SendingLargeFiles

 

 

---

Compressed Versus Uncompressed AVI Camtasia Video Files
Podcasting and Vodcasting Using Camtasia and Screencast

Although I've been using Camtasia for years, I've recently been preparing some Camtasia video for a road show that I will do on education technology. Camtasia is wonderful for making educational videos, especially narrated videos of lessons and tutorials on computer screens, videos of narrated PowerPoint files, interactive videos, podcasts (audio), Vodcasts (video), and narrated sequences of pictures turned into video files.

One really nice thing about Camtasia is that you do not have to record an entire video clip continuously, It's easy to record a segment and then hit the pause button (or F9 that's used both to start a recording session and pause a recording session). That way you have time for each segment to think about what you're going to say and to bring up software, video files, audio files, and/or Websites appropriate for that segment of the clip. When you've finished the entire clip you can hit the stop button (or F10) to generate a avi file. Later on you can "produce" a compressed version of the clip.

Camtasia generally captures video as uncompressed avi files. These uncompressed files are enormous and are not efficient for storing on CDs, DVDs, Web servers, Blackboard servers, WebCT servers, etc. Fortunately Camtasia has software called "Producer" in Camtasia Suite that compresses videos into much smaller files that can be played in common software such as wmv files for Windows Media Player, rm files for RealMedia, mov files for Quicktime, scf files for Adobe flash, mp3 files, and other "production" files.

I thought you might be interested in how much disk space is saved in the compression process. Last weekend I made a number of Camtasia avi videos and then compressed them into wmv video for Windows Media Player. I have both an old Camtasia 2 and a current Camtasia 4 (with updates). I captured the avi files using Camtasia 4, because this will also capture video playing on the screen. However, I found that the Producer software in Camtasia 2 gave me smaller compressed video files for some reason. The savings are shown below comparing the avi files and my compressed files:

Video	Uncompressed AVI File Size	Compressed Video File Size	Video Run Time
Video 1	106,095 KB avi	5,928 KB wmv	02.57minutes
Video 2	319,904 KB avi	29,586 KB wmv	22.28 minutes
Video 3	162,745 KB avi	22,228 KB swf	05.47 minutes
Video 4	25,315 KB avi	4,766 KB wmv	04.49 minutes

Warning:  You can only edit the video (e.g., add fades, delete portions of clips, combine clips, split clits, change volume, etc) in the uncompressed avi video using Producer software. You lose quality in video and audio if you have to re-capture a compressed video as a avi file using Camtasia. Hence, it is best to store the initial avi files somewhere if you think you might want to edit later on.

The video size to runtime ratio varies greatly with both the capture rate and the size of the region on a computer screen that you are capturing. Since all the above videos were captured at the same (default) capture rate, the ratio of file size to run time varies greatly because the capture region varies in size in each of the above videos.  Capturing only a region greatly saves on the size of the captured video file. Capturing full or nearly-full screen sizes greatly adds to the video file size.

Video size relative to video run time also depends heavily on the frame rate at which the video is captured. Camtasia allows you to use a default setting for both the capture rate and audio interleaving. This is fast enough to capture video with audio playing on the screen with reasonable lip synching if the audio shows the face of a speaker. If you were making a video of a PowerPoint file without adding audio narration you could save disk space by greatly slowing down the video capture rate. However, I generally do not mess with the default settings. If you want to change the frame rates, you can read more about it --- Click Here
You can also change playback rates --- Click Here

Camtasia allows you to do some things like highlighting where your cursor is pointing. I generally use a big yellowish translucent circle around my mouse pointer. You can also have audio sounds whenever you click on your mouse and/or keyboard. This may alert student attention. You can also bring up a pen that allows you to write on video screens without writing on the computer program, like Excel, that you are running in the video.

You can also pan and zoom. Zoom lets you point to something like a cell formula in Excel and then make that formula larger and larger and larger. You can subsequently return to normal size. I use the panning feature when I am only recording a region of a screen such as a rectangle about a third of the size of the full computer screen. Capturing only a region greatly saves on the size of the captured video file. I use the panning feature to allow me to float the capture region to wherever I move my mouse. This allows me to capture anything appearing on a computer screen without having to capture a full screen in every video frame.

Years ago I started using Camtasia to field questions posed by students. For example, after technical lessons in my Accounting Information Systems course, I almost always received email messages from students who could not get something to work, especially in Excel and MS Access. I would then record a video tutorial and shared my answers with the entire current class and my future classes. You can download some of my sample wmv tutorials in this regard from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
The acronym PQQ stands for Possible Quiz Question source.

I also prepared longer tutorials on more complicated technical lectures in my Accounting Theory course. Most all of my students were confused after my lectures in this course until they viewed my video tutorials over and over and over. Some of my tutorials for the theory course are at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/

I also recorded some general tutorials that you can download from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/

I have other tutorials that are filed away somewhere on CDs. It would take some effort to dig them out now.

The nice thing about Camtasia is that it's is so simple to use when creating and compressing video. Editing video is more complicated. It is also possible to add hot spots to swf flash video that you have compressed such that you can create interactive videos for your students, including examination videos. However, this is extremely tedious. I found it better to create my interactive examination files in Excel and then link to my tutorial videos at any time in those Excel files.

The hard thing about Camtasia is getting the audio to sound professional. Actually, I found my narrations using a cheap microphone adequate for my course tutorials. This weekend I had satisfactory results using only the internal microphone that's built into my Dell laptop. However, audio could be improved with an expensive microphone and a sound proof booth. Ambient noise in your office can be irritating when recorded in video.

If you are recording in your office, you should probably disconnect the telephone during recording sessions. Also put a sign on your office door that you are in a recording session.

It is also possible to make videos of PowerPoint files. If you choose to do so you can easily add a Camtasia toolbar in your PowerPoint file such that you can make videos with audio narrations on any any part or all of a PowerPoint file. That way you can teach from PowerPoint when you're out of town, retired, or dead.Users can download compressed video files of PowerPoint files with less virus risk than from any MS Office files such as doc, xls. or ppt files. However, when I narrate any of my PowerPoint files and make videos of them, I generally find that even the compressed videos are enormous since my PowerPoint files usually have more than 50 slides. Actually, it is probably best to compress PowerPoint vides at a slow frame rate as swf Flash files. Since Powerpoint is not fast moving video, a slower frame rate is usually quite satisfactory.

Nevertheless, recording and serving up entire lectures requires huge amounts of disk space. If your university will not provide you with enough Web, Blackboard, or WebCT server space for such large video files, I suggest that you make a DVD disk of compressed video for each lesson and then make these disks available in the library or by mail to students. Your campus media center may have more creative solutions.

 

	A summary video of using Camtasia for recording and serving up Podcasts, Vodcasts, and Audio Enhanced PowerPoint files --- Click Here

Three nice summary videos on how to create interactive Flash videos using Camtasia --- Click Here

You can find out more about Camtasia and related TechSmith products at http://www.techsmith.com/

You can watch an introductory video at http://video.techsmith.com/camtasia/latest/demo/summary/enu/cs_summary.html

TechSmith has a link to Richard Campbell's (University of Rio Grande) interactive examination questions at http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
However, the link to Richard's files appears to broken, and Richard says he can no longer find the illustration file.

Happy video, podcast, and vodcast producing!

 

---

Tip 2 of the Day for Camtasia Users:  Choose a Compression Option 

After you create a video Using Camtasia it is an avi file.  One problem is that the avi file may be enormous.  Another problem is that it can only be viewed by users who have installed the Camtasia viewer. 

Not every user has every media player. That’s why Camtasia Studio supports various popular multimedia formats:

·       Macromedia Flash (.flv and .swf)

·       Windows Media (.wmv)

·       Apple QuickTime (.mov)

·       RealNetworks RealMedia (.rm)

·       And More!

Warning:  When I made some of my tutorials on using Camtasia, only the RealMedia compression option was not available.  Until I update that video, keep in mind that the other compression options are now available.  My older tutorial video is linked at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
One of these days I might find the time to update this tutorial.

The Camtasia homepage is at http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp
For audio, you need a microphone plugged into your computer.  And don’t forget to turn the audio on using menu option (Effects, Audio, Record Audio).  

Question
What is Morae?

Answer
I love Camtasia and use it all the time to make video from my computer screens while I narrate into a microphone --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

Now TechSmith has come out with an even better product called Morae --- http://www.techsmith.com/products/morae/morae.asp 

Morae is a revolutionary new computer recording system based on Rich Recording TechnologyTM, which not only records the computer screen and camera video, but also automatically creates a synchronized chronicle of events occuring behind-the-scenes in applications and the operating system. Now you can search screen and video recordings based on specific events that occurred - like when a user hit a certain keystroke, opened a particular dialog box, clicked a certain tool button or viewed specific text. Easily perform in-depth analysis, mark important segments and quickly create highlight videos to share.

Morae is an easy-to-use and easy-to-implement usability testing tool that allows you to record, log, analyze and present. It was designed from the ground up based on in-depth research and feedback from usability professionals.

Tip 3 
One of the frustrations I have with Camtasia and Morae is that recording audio other than your microphone-in instructions is frustrating.  I received the following message from a technician at Tech Smith.  The link he provides is very informative.

          

• Hi Bob,
•  
• I see you have a question about Morae and Camtasia. Well, the technical answer is that you really can’t record the audio from your speakers with just Morae and not a microphone. However, we do know of a couple workarounds. The first would be to change the settings with you computers audio, as seen with this Camtasia Studio workaround.
• http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/tutorials/1205.4.asp 
•  
• Second way would be to take a double sided microphone or speaker cable and plug one end in the mic slot and one in the speaker slot. Stores like Radio Shack carry a cable like that.
•  
• I hope that this helps you out. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
•  
• Thanks,
•  
• Mike

Tip 4 (How to Edit Video)

PC editing software answer from Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2005; Page B4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/mossberg_mailbox.html

Q: A friend of mine is looking for some video-editing software to be used on a PC running Windows. What software would you recommend for this application?

A: I haven't tested this category of software in a while, but any of the leading software packages should do. They include Pinnacle Studio Plus, Adobe Premiere Elements and Roxio Easy Media Creator. The first two are video-editing programs. The last includes a video-editing program, but it is a suite that also handles things like music and photos. Of the two video-only programs, Pinnacle's is probably best for a novice user. It costs about $90.

Jensen Comment
What separates the amateurs like me from the pros is the ability to edit the audio that accompanies the video.  When you want to add or remove frames containing audio, you had best employ a pro.

 

 

• A video about how to navigate Bob Jensen's Website --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/

• Video Tutorials in Accounting Theory --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/ 
  
  For those of you who want to watch some of my videos about derivative instruments and hedging, the videos can be downloaded from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/fas133/WindowsMedia/

• Video Tutorials in Accounting Information Systems --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/ 

• I created a video tutorial for XBRL.  You can download the xbrldemos.wmv file from the following path
  http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/windowsmedia/

  • The accompanying XBRL tutorial is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#XBRLextended 

• Summary Listing --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm

• Note for Trinity Students

  Although you cannot access Drive J off campus, I want to point out that you can access my course  video tutorials from anywhere in the world.  The link is http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/

  You will find avi, rm, and wmf versions of most every video.  I recommend that you choose the wmf version that will play in the Windows Media player that should be on your home computer.  

  If you have speakers on your home computer, there is an advantage of running these videos at home.  On campus in the computer labs, you must first check out earphones from IMS and then hope the ear phones will work in a particular lab computer.  It is a lot less hassle to run my tutorial videos on your home computer.  

  There is also something similar in freeware.

   

  April 8, 2004 message from Bud Labitan

  ************************
  -----Original Message----- 
  From: Budlabitan@aol.com [mailto:Budlabitan@aol.com]  
  Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 9:12 PM  
  To: Jensen, Robert 
  Subject: question 

  Bob,

  Your excelgoalseek.wmv is excellent --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/  
  Can you tell me what frame rate and audio setting you used?   I am attempting to get as good a level of resolution on a file I am playing with.  

  I found freeware called camstudio which creates avi files, and I also found an avi to wmv converter.

   http://download.softpedia.com:8080/MULTIMEDIA/VIDEO/camstudio.exe  http://wcarchive.cdrom.com/pub/bws/bws_47/StoikVideoConverter10.zipor  

  I got better results after downloading the newest windowsmedia codecs from Microsoft.  

  Thanks,  

  Bud
  *********************************

---

Free Multi-featured Sound Recorder (Audacity) --- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features

Although I prefer Camtasia when I want to narrate a video of my computer screen action (e.g., when preparing a video tutorial on something technical), there are times when audio alone will suffice and take up a whole lot less space on a hard drive or server. 

Those of you who would like to prepare audio podcasting files may also want a good sound recorder on your PC.

I highly recommend the free Audacity software.  It downloads and installs very quickly.  Its many features are listed at --- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features

---

• Question
  How can you incorporate streaming media such as archived webcast into a live presentation?

  Answer:

  You should try www.playstream.com  - They have very inexpensive streaming services using a variety of file types - wmv, mp3, realmedia and quicktime. After you upload your clips to your site, you will get an "easylink", and all you need to do is paste that link into your Powerpoint presentation. Playstream has been purchased by Vitalstream, but the new owner has only enhanced their services.

  Richard J. Campbell
  mailto:campbell@rio.edu

   
• Breakthrough in Camcorder Technology
  P.S. David Pogue is one of the leading experts in technology

  "Aha! Video Straight to a Computer," by David Pogue, The New York Times, September 22, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/technology/circuits/22pogue.html

  EVERY now and then, humanity wakes up, looks at itself in the mirror and realizes that it's been wasting a lot of effort doing things the old way just for the sake of tradition. From the caveman who first put a bunch of rolling logs under something heavy, to the genius who packed four times more orange juice onto a truck by condensing it first, history is filled with "Aha!" moments that propel society forward.

  . . .

  The result of this brainstorm was the new Everio G series: tiny, lightweight, reasonably priced camcorders that contain iPod-type miniature hard drives. There are four models in all, ranging from the GZ-MG20 to the GZ-MG50. The differences are the prices ($750 to $800 online), light sensitivity, hard drive capacity (20 or 30 gigabytes), zoom lens power (15X or 25X), and the resolution of the low-quality still photos (0.3 megapixel or 1.3). Not one of them uses a tape or DVD.

  The hard drive holds five or seven hours of video at top quality - easily a vacation's worth. The 2.5-inch screen displays each shot as a thumbnail image (or as an entry in a chronological list), so you can jump directly to anything filmed without having to rewind or fast-forward. You can assemble up to 99 video playlists on this screen, too (selected scenes that play back in a certain order). And who among us hasn't, at one point or another, accidentally recorded over something important on a videotape? (Oh, sorry - touchy subject.) On a hard-drive camcorder, that is impossible.

  UNLIKE JVC's Everio MC200 camcorders, which feature lower-capacity, removable hard drive cards, the Everio G's drive is permanent and built in. (It's mounted on gel supports for shock resistance, and uses a laptop-style motion sensor to protect the drive from sudden jolts.) Once it fills up, that's it; the camcorder is out of commission until some hard drive space is emptied.

  You can do that by deleting some scenes, using the thumbnail table of contents view. You can play the video back on a TV (both RCA-type and S-video jacks are built right into the camera), while recording it with a VCR or set-top DVD recorder, then delete the originals.

  But you're really supposed to transfer the video directly to a computer, edit it, and maybe burn it to a DVD. When you get right down to it, this camcorder doesn't make much sense for people who don't ordinarily edit their own video on a computer

  Continued in article

   

• Advanced Video Technology
  Amy Dunbar developed the following links for all participants in her workshop in Hawaii.  She also gave me permission to share it with readers of New Bookmarks.  Thanks to Amy and her other team members for sharing their presentation materials.

  Using Technology to Distribute Course Content On and Off Campus AAA Annual Meeting - 2003
  Continuing Education Workshop --- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/agenda.htm 
  Hilton Hawaiian Village, Second Floor, Tapa Conference Center, Iolani Suite 4
  Saturday, August 2, 2003

• One of the better tutorials for video streaming is at http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/videomanual1/wwwtoolkit.html
  

• March 22, 2004 message from Dave Will

  I am very involved with SYNCHRONOUS (LIVE) online training using web conferencing (not video conferencing). Have you ever used this technology? Students can attend a class or you can tutor them one-to-one using web conferencing.. They see what's on your PC while you all talk in a telephone conference call. It is very interactive, reliable and easy to use. Some universities are using it for classes, review sessions and office hours.

  Dave Will dwill@bostonlearninginc.com 

• From the T.H.E. Newsletter on May 4, 2005

  CrystalGraphics Inc., a developer and publisher of add-on products for Microsoft Office, has released PowerPlugs: Video Backgrounds Player and PowerPlugs: Video Backgrounds Content . The Video Backgrounds Player is a unique software product that plugs directly into Microsoft PowerPoint allowing users to select and insert full-screen moving backgrounds into their presentations quickly and effortlessly. It is also compatible with all of PowerPoint's animation tools and text-editing capabilities. Video Backgrounds Content is the perfect complement to the Video Backgrounds Player software. It features nine volumes that each include 25 unique background video clips optimized for use with PowerPoint so they can play back smoothly in real time on most Pentium III or higher PCs. The footage is royalty free, so you can use it as many times as you like in your presentations with no added cost.

  For more, visit http://www.crystalgraphics.com

  Bob Jensen's threads on resources are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources
  
  About Video Editing --- http://www.aboutvideoediting.com/

   

• Video Games http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#VideoGames 

• Excel Tips and Helpers (Including Videos)      

• JavaScript Illustrations and Coding Explanations

• JavaScript and DHTML Operators, Expressions, and References

• Danny Goodman's JavaScript Helpers 

• Bob Jensen's Search Helpers

"Building Programming Tutorials with Codecademy," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/building-programming-tutorials-with-codecademy/38378?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

For those learning to code this year, either for professional reasons or to expand personal horizons, Codecademy has been a popular tool. Jason has written about Codecademy as a platform for code-literacy, and I discussed the Codeyear “new year’s resolution” initiative the site launched in January. Now the platform has expanded even further with the addition of tools that allow any user to create new courses and projects in JavaScript, Python and Ruby.

Codecademy may not be a substitute for more traditional forms of programming instruction, but this new platform does offer possibilities for shaping hybrid learning or building coding familiarity into a course dedicated to another topic, as customized tutorials could supplement face to face instruction. Julie Meloni makes some great points about the pedagogical problems of Codecademy and the question of results: “…it is not teaching you how to code. It is teaching you how to call-and-response, and is not particularly helpful in explaining why you’re responding, why they’re calling, or—most importantly—how to become a composer.” I share a number of these concerns, particularly when Codecademy is the only source of knowledge–and I hope that this new tool affords Codecademy the opportunity to crowdsource new approaches to pedagogy.

There are some great examples of instructional programming tools available for free on the web, such as Scratch, MIT’s young-learner friendly code “building blocks.” (Scratch is just one kid-targeted programming tool: there are other great suggestions at Digital Humanities Q&A.) But these are often starter languages that don’t directly apply to web development or other applications, and thus require additional investment before literacy in more widely-used languages is achieved.

The choice of languages in Codecademy’s toolset focuses on utilitarian scripting languages with a range of potential applications. As Ryan Cordell noted in Ruby for Humanists, Ruby is a great starting language and its inclusion is particularly promising. As Ryan mentioned, there’s already a site for learning programming basics through Ruby tutorials: Hackety Hack. But Codecademy moves a step further with an easy system for building and sharing interactive tutorials.

Continued in article

4Teachers: Teach with Technology --- http://www.4teachers.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on new and old tools are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#NewTools

 

Video Courses

Learning Basic Financial Accounting at Brigham Young University (BYU) From Homegrown Videos
Developer and Instructor:  Norman Nemrow [nemrow@byu.edu] 
Title of Package of Eight CDs:  Introduction to Accounting:  The Language of Business
Textbook:  I think this package can be used along with virtually any basic accounting textbook
Pedagogy:  Students learn from video lesson modules before each class.  The video lessons display 
                  the course instructor in video as well as accompanying PowerPoint displays that are auto-
                  matically sequenced with the video.  Students have nifty options to both replay the previous
                  five minutes and to play the videos a double (2x) speed that is an outstanding option
                  for reviewing previously-learned material.
Classes:  Classes are more inspirational than perspirational (e.g., frequent use of visiting speakers)
Outcomes:  Purportedly students perform better vis-à-vis previous lecture pedagogy without video. 
                   See the following evaluation of learning:

 "Variable Speed Playback of Digitally Recorded Lectures: Evaluating Learner Feedback," by Joel D. Galbraith (joel_galbraith@byu.edu ) and Steven G. Spencer --- http://www.enounce.com/docs/BYUPaper020319.pdf 

Cost:

1. Student purchase of CD set for around $45.  Colleges can negotiate pricing with BYU.
   
   
2. $19.99 for download and installation of the Enounce 2xAV video plug-in --- http://www.enounce.com/ 

Bob Jensen's Bottom-Line Conclusion:  
Bravo Norm!  This is a tremendous pedagogy for all levels of accounting education

Bob Jensen's Recommendations for Improvements:

1. Flash video is restricted to video of PowerPoint slides accompanying a talking head.  I 
   prefer a Camtasia video development that allows an instructor to easily make video and 
   audio lesson modules from other software such as MS Excel, MS Access, accounting software
   like Intuit, tax software, simulation software, etc.  
   
    
2. The product could be greatly improved if instructors could customize lessons by adding their own
   video modules.  This is especially exciting for instructors using Camtasia.  
   See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#Video 
   
   
3. The 2xAV plug-in allows students to make use of the tremendous double speed advantage when
   there are a lot of video modules to learn and re-learn.  However, this is a pain for campus 
   computing labs that have to install such a plug-in all lab computers.  I recommend an option that
   will allow video playback on computers that do not have the 2xAV plug-in.
   
   
4. There is also a minor glich for Windows XP operating systems.  I got the video lessons to work
   wonderfully on my old computer having a Windows NT operating system.  The lessons did not
   work initially on my new computer running under Windows XP

October 8 message from Cameron Earl [byu@burgoyne.com] 

Bob,

I know exactly what your problem is. We have identified a problem with Windows XP and our CDs due to a legal dispute between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. I have attached a small document, which will fix your problem. Four files are needed for the fix. Unfortunately, they are too big for me to send with my current internet connection. I will go to campus soon and send them. Please call me anytime (even after normal business hours) if you have any questions. 801-836-5649

Cameron Earl

Find out more about ordering options from Cameron at 801-836-5649 or by email at Cameron Earl [byu@burgoyne.com] 
A Website for this product is still under development at the Marriott School of Business at BYU.

Update February 29, 2004

Basic accounting students At BYU have great success learning accounting from special videos --- http://snipurl.com/videoBYU 

Contact Information: 
Cameron Earl 801-836-5649 cameronearl@byu.edu
Norm Nemrow 801-422-3029 nemrow@byu.edu 

Also see David Cottrell's approach at BYU --- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/AAA2003Cottrell.pdf 

Advanced Video Technology
Amy Dunbar developed the following links for all participants in her workshop in Hawaii .  She also gave me permission to share it with readers of New Bookmarks.  Thanks to Amy and her other team members for sharing their presentation materials.
Using Technology to Distribute Course Content On and Off Campus AAA Annual Meeting - 2003
Continuing Education Workshop --- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/agenda.htm  

Bob Jensen's threads and videos, including a video on how to develop your own course materials using the cheap and easy Camtasia Studio software can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

July 5, 2005 message from Brigham Young University's Cameron Earl [cameronearl@byu.edu]

Bob,

Its been a while since we have spoken/ emailed. I hope you are doing well. I noticed on your thread that you do not have our updated information- namely our website. Norm Nemrow and I have developed a new website that explains more about our CDs and the teaching model we use at BYU. You may find interesting. In fact, we would love some feedback if you have the time to look at it. The site is brand new and still has one more round of editing (i.e., correcting typos and such) Norm values your opinion greatly. Just thought I would let you know about it. Feel free to share it with others.

Its www.byuaccounting.com 

Take care

Cameron Earl

Also note that David Cottrell from BYU participated in Amy Dunbar's education technology workshop prior to the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting in Hawaii --- http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/AAA-CPE/AAA2003Cottrell.pdf

February 28 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU] 

I am doing a comparison of Robodemo v5.0 elearning edition and Camtasia v2.02. I use both - sometimes in the same project. Both are very easy to use.

Robodemo advantages over Camtasia: The Flash hotspot output allow for quizzing that can be sent to a LMS (Learning Management System). Robodemo allows for limited scriptability with Javascript.

Camtasia has more output options - avi - mov - real - wnv - Camtasia v2.02 has some minor crash issues for some people,

Camtasia has a "Theater" utility which allows you to chain swf files together. Ehelp did have a utility called RoboPresenter that was and is more flexible that Camtasia's Theater More on this later.

Richard Campbell

February 28, 2004 reply from Bob Jensen

Thank you for the update Richard.

The one feature that I would like to see added is a convenient way of choosing between microphone audio versus line-in audio versus audio that is already stored on the computer. Sometimes what I would really like is to use Camtasia to record audio and/or video clips that are playing on the computer so I can insert these segments.

For example, suppose that I was recording a Camtasia video on fraud. It would be nice to be able to insert a small video segment of an ex con while explaining fraud in some program like Excel, PowerPoint, or Internet Explorer.

I realize that the Camtasia video degrades captured video due to a lower sampling rate (usually 5 frames per second) versus normal video frame rates of 30 per second. However, this may not be a huge problem in short video clips as long as the audio is good.

In Camtasia it is possible to run a hard wire from the audio out jack on the back of the computer to the microphone jack, but this is a pain in the tail and does not generally lead to good capturing of audio.

Is there any solution for this until Tech Smith finally upgrades for better audio and video recording of something other than microphone voice while capturing Camtasia video?

Is this also a problem in Robodemo?

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads on Camtasia are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

February 28, 2004 reply from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU] 

Bob: To integrate video into Powerpoint you could try the free Microsoft Producer or try apresso:

www.apreso.com 

The link below will integrate a number of alternative file formats and was marketed by ehelp as RoboPresenter until Macromedia bought ehelp.

http://www.articulateglobal.com/main.html 

February 29, 2004 reply from John Schatzel [jschatzel@STONEHILL.EDU] 

 I have been looking into this type of Flash tutorial creation software myself and found that Camtasia was well featured but not as powerful as RoboDemo, which is probably why Macromedia acquired the company. RoboDemo is also the most expensive: $500 Yikes! although educational pricing may be available. At the other end, I like Wink, which is FREE! If it does what you want then you can't beat Wink: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/  If it doesn't, then you have to pay. If your school is picking up the tab, then I would say go for RoboDemo unless you find it too difficult to use. I believe there is a 15-day trial version on the Macromdia site.

John Schatzel 
Professor of Accounting and Information Systems 
Stonehill College

Video Helpers

Video and Other Helper Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 
(New videos will be added steadily for the next several months.  I love Camtasia.)

Compressed Versus Uncompressed AVI Camtasia Video Files
Podcasting and Vodcasting Using Camtasia and Screencast

Although I've been using Camtasia for years, I've recently been preparing some Camtasia video for a road show that I will do on education technology. Camtasia is wonderful for making educational videos, especially narrated videos of lessons and tutorials on computer screens, videos of narrated PowerPoint files, interactive videos, podcasts (audio), Vodcasts (video), and narrated sequences of pictures turned into video files.

One really nice thing about Camtasia is that you do not have to record an entire video clip continuously, It's easy to record a segment and then hit the pause button (or F9 that's used both to start a recording session and pause a recording session). That way you have time for each segment to think about what you're going to say and to bring up software, video files, audio files, and/or Websites appropriate for that segment of the clip. When you've finished the entire clip you can hit the stop button (or F10) to generate a avi file. Later on you can "produce" a compressed version of the clip.

Camtasia generally captures video as uncompressed avi files. These uncompressed files are enormous and are not efficient for storing on CDs, DVDs, Web servers, Blackboard servers, WebCT servers, etc. Fortunately Camtasia has software called "Producer" in Camtasia Suite that compresses videos into much smaller files that can be played in common software such as wmv files for Windows Media Player, rm files for RealMedia, mov files for Quicktime, scf files for Adobe flash, mp3 files, and other "production" files.

I thought you might be interested in how much disk space is saved in the compression process. Last weekend I made a number of Camtasia avi videos and then compressed them into wmv video for Windows Media Player. I have both an old Camtasia 2 and a current Camtasia 4 (with updates). I captured the avi files using Camtasia 4, because this will also capture video playing on the screen. However, I found that the Producer software in Camtasia 2 gave me smaller compressed video files for some reason. The savings are shown below comparing the avi files and my compressed files:

Warning:  You can only edit the video (e.g., add fades, delete portions of clips, combine clips, split clits, change volume, etc) in the uncompressed avi video using Producer software. You lose quality in video and audio if you have to re-capture a compressed video as a avi file using Camtasia. Hence, it is best to store the initial avi files somewhere if you think you might want to edit later on.

The video size to runtime ratio varies greatly with both the capture rate and the size of the region on a computer screen that you are capturing. Since all the above videos were captured at the same (default) capture rate, the ratio of file size to run time varies greatly because the capture region varies in size in each of the above videos.  Capturing only a region greatly saves on the size of the captured video file. Capturing full or nearly-full screen sizes greatly adds to the video file size.

Video size relative to video run time also depends heavily on the frame rate at which the video is captured. Camtasia allows you to use a default setting for both the capture rate and audio interleaving. This is fast enough to capture video with audio playing on the screen with reasonable lip synching if the audio shows the face of a speaker. If you were making a video of a PowerPoint file without adding audio narration you could save disk space by greatly slowing down the video capture rate. However, I generally do not mess with the default settings. If you want to change the frame rates, you can read more about it --- Click Here
You can also change playback rates --- Click Here

Camtasia allows you to do some things like highlighting where your cursor is pointing. I generally use a big yellowish translucent circle around my mouse pointer. You can also have audio sounds whenever you click on your mouse and/or keyboard. This may alert student attention. You can also bring up a pen that allows you to write on video screens without writing on the computer program, like Excel, that you are running in the video.

You can also pan and zoom. Zoom lets you point to something like a cell formula in Excel and then make that formula larger and larger and larger. You can subsequently return to normal size. I use the panning feature when I am only recording a region of a screen such as a rectangle about a third of the size of the full computer screen. Capturing only a region greatly saves on the size of the captured video file. I use the panning feature to allow me to float the capture region to wherever I move my mouse. This allows me to capture anything appearing on a computer screen without having to capture a full screen in every video frame.

Years ago I started using Camtasia to field questions posed by students. For example, after technical lessons in my Accounting Information Systems course, I almost always received email messages from students who could not get something to work, especially in Excel and MS Access. I would then record a video tutorial and shared my answers with the entire current class and my future classes. You can download some of my sample wmv tutorials in this regard from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
The acronym PQQ stands for Possible Quiz Question source.

I also prepared longer tutorials on more complicated technical lectures in my Accounting Theory course. Most all of my students were confused after my lectures in this course until they viewed my video tutorials over and over and over. Some of my tutorials for the theory course are at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/

I also recorded some general tutorials that you can download from http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Tutorials/

I have other tutorials that are filed away somewhere on CDs. It would take some effort to dig them out now.

The nice thing about Camtasia is that it's is so simple to use when creating and compressing video. Editing video is more complicated. It is also possible to add hot spots to swf flash video that you have compressed such that you can create interactive videos for your students, including examination videos. However, this is extremely tedious. I found it better to create my interactive examination files in Excel and then link to my tutorial videos at any time in those Excel files.

The hard thing about Camtasia is getting the audio to sound professional. Actually, I found my narrations using a cheap microphone adequate for my course tutorials. This weekend I had satisfactory results using only the internal microphone that's built into my Dell laptop. However, audio could be improved with an expensive microphone and a sound proof booth. Ambient noise in your office can be irritating when recorded in video.

If you are recording in your office, you should probably disconnect the telephone during recording sessions. Also put a sign on your office door that you are in a recording session.

It is also possible to make videos of PowerPoint files. If you choose to do so you can easily add a Camtasia toolbar in your PowerPoint file such that you can make videos with audio narrations on any any part or all of a PowerPoint file. That way you can teach from PowerPoint when you're out of town, retired, or dead.Users can download compressed video files of PowerPoint files with less virus risk than from any MS Office files such as doc, xls. or ppt files. However, when I narrate any of my PowerPoint files and make videos of them, I generally find that even the compressed videos are enormous since my PowerPoint files usually have more than 50 slides. Actually, it is probably best to compress PowerPoint vides at a slow frame rate as swf Flash files. Since Powerpoint is not fast moving video, a slower frame rate is usually quite satisfactory.

Nevertheless, recording and serving up entire lectures requires huge amounts of disk space. If your university will not provide you with enough Web, Blackboard, or WebCT server space for such large video files, I suggest that you make a DVD disk of compressed video for each lesson and then make these disks available in the library or by mail to students. Your campus media center may have more creative solutions.

	A summary video of using Camtasia for recording and serving up Podcasts, Vodcasts, and Audio Enhanced PowerPoint files --- Click Here

You can find out more about Camtasia and related TechSmith products at http://www.techsmith.com/

You can watch an introductory video at http://video.techsmith.com/camtasia/latest/demo/summary/enu/cs_summary.html

TechSmith has a link to Richard Campbell's (University of Rio Grande) interactive examination questions at http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
However, the link to Richard's files appears to broken, and Richard says he can no longer find the illustration file.

Happy video, podcast, and vodcast producing!

How can you capture and send streaming media?

Answer --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#StreamingMedia

Ratings and reviews of media streaming software --- http://www.homeofficereports.com/streaming%20video.htm

Video and Audio Recording for Classrooms

September 8, 2005 message from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

Does anybody have any experience with Microsoft’s OneNote? What caught my eye was the mention in an article that you can use OneNote to record audio (e.g., during a meeting) on your computer (like a tape recorder). I was looking at the program on the Microsoft site and see that OneNote is software for organizing stuff (note, files, graphics, etc.).

Any thoughts for comments on OneNote? Any comments on other programs that I could use to record audio? I particularly want to record during meetings. I know that there are stand alone recorders, but it is one more thing to take to the meeting.

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f 

September 9, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

There is a highly favorable review (that does not go far into the audio features) at http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/choosingsoftware/a/onenoterev.htm 
I suspect Richard Campbell will weigh in on this with better suggestions.

I would think there is a problem with audio hardware much the same as I have a problem with my video camera at meetings. Unless I sit in the front row, it is difficult to pick up the speaker’s voice. If there is audience/class discussion throughout a room, it is very difficult to capture individual speakers.

The FBI probably has better audio capturing hardware than we can put on our laptops, but I would not expect OneNote software to magically allow us to get quality recordings at many meetings.

That does not mean that we should not download the free trial offer just to test out OneNote for all the many features claimed in the review above. It would seem that it will work optimally with a Tablet PC.

Bob Jensen

September 8, 2005 reply from Amy Dunbar

I don’t have experience with OneNote, but capturing audio is always a struggle for me. Camtasia is wonderful for screen capture video with audio, but to just record audio has presented more problems for me. I used to use the Microsoft Sound Recorder (under Accessories in Windows) and convert the wav file to an .rm file using Real Producer. Now that I have left the Real world (;-)), I am recording in Screenblaster and rendering the file as an MP3 file. I find it annoying, however, to have a music program, like ITunes, open it. I just want it to immediately play when the student clicks the link. If anyone has a better solution for converting wav files to a better format, I would love to hear about it. A UConn ITS person recommended CDEX

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ , which is open source freeware.

Back to what you were asking, Glen. How would you capture everyone’s voices unless they had mics? I know audio conference tools can capture everyone, but in that case, each person is speaking into a mic at his/her computer.

And speaking of audio conferencing, does anyone know how many people can be in a Skype audio conference? I have only experienced three at a time. I am teaching a small PhD class, and I have asked my students to download Skype ( www.skype.com ) so we can easily find each other because all of us work at home a lot (which is a good thing in these times of skyrocketing gas prices). When a California colleague’s cell phone connection was to weak to have a conversation, we switched to Skype, and it worked like a charm.

Amy at UCon

September 9, 2005 reply from Jim Richards [J.Richards@MURDOCH.EDU.AU]

Hi Amy,

My recollection with Skype is that the maximum is 5.

Cheers,
Jim Richards
Murdoch Business School
Murdoch University South Street
MURDOCH WA
Australia

September 9, 2005 reply from Jim Richards [J.Richards@MURDOCH.EDU.AU]

Hi Glen
You may find that to record using your laptop might need a good quality omni-directional microphone to pick up a sufficiently loud signal.

Some open source software that can be used to record and export mp3 files is Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net ).

We use it at my local Church to record all of our ministry. You need to also download and install LAME to be able to export to mp3.

Cheers.

Jim Richards
Murdoch Business School
Murdoch University South Street
MURDOCH WA 6150 Phone: 61-8-9360-2706 Fax: 61-8-9310-5004

September 8, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

I can’t help with you’re SKYPE question.

But I want to add that the new version of Camtasia allows for camcorder input so that the image is no longer just confined to computer screen images. Even though digital video takes up massive amounts of space, Camtasia videos do not have to be space hogging full screens and the videos can be compressed in the final production.

The big problem with video capturing at meetings is that the video is often less interesting than the audio unless the speaker is using visual aids. Capturing video of a talking head is a total waste of space digitally speaking. I still use an analog camera and space is no problem since video tapes are cheap ways to store lots of video.

My problem of course is that my hundreds of video tapes will soon be as obsolete as my withering 8-track audio tapes. Soon we won’t be able to buy new machines that will play video tapes, so take good care of the old players in your house or office. And consider putting them to DVD in the near future.

Bob Jensen

Converting Home Videos to DVDs

Q: Are there services that will take home video and burn it to a DVD that can be played anywhere? I know I can do this on my PC, but it takes too much time and I keep running into problems when I try it.

A: There are such services. One that I have tested and found to be good is called YesVideo (yesvideo.com). You bring your videos into a store that works with YesVideo -- including CVS, Walgreen, Best Buy and Target -- and they send the tapes to YesVideo, which converts them to a very nice DVD. You also can get the same service online, at Sony's ImageStation site ( www.imagestation.com ). Sony calls its service Video2DVD, but it really is just the YesVideo service. My full review of the service is at: ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20040128.html. Because YesVideo works through retailers, prices vary, but are usually around $25-$35 for a two-hour video. Each DVD is divided into chapters based on a YesVideo process that tries to detect scene changes in your videos. At the end, there are three 60-second music videos made from scenes on your videos. The company also will put your prints, slides and even old film onto DVD, but this costs more and is handled by fewer retailers. Details are at the YesVideo Web site.
Walter Mossberg, "Converting Home Videos to DVDs," The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2005; Page B3 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112492084317722331,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

At last there will be a way to efficiently store digital video
But this is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than three hours.
Holographic Memory
By Gregory T. Huang , "Holographic Memory," MIT's Technology Review, September 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/09/issue/feature_memory.asp?trk=nl

Convert AVI to WMV, BMP, JPG, etc. - OSS Video Decompiler 4.0 --- http://www.tomdownload.com/multimedia_design/video/oss_video_decompiler.htm

Powerful Video Decompiler that supports decompiling video files to extract the individual image frames. Supports AVI to WMV, AVI to GIF, AVI to (PNG, JPEG, JPG, EMF, WMV, BMP, and more). Video Decompiling (Supported formats AVI to GIF, AVI to PNG (Portable Network Graphics), AVI to JPEG, AVI to TIFF, AVI to EMF, AVI to WMV). Convert multiple video files at once (Batch Conversion). Many modern features were added to the latest versions. Now you can save and load video conversion and effects settings using XML.

It appears that Camstudio has a freeware video screen capture system that competes with the non-freeware Camtasia (that I love) for capturing computer screen activity in to video.  The Camstudio software lacks many of the great features of Camtasia, especially the feature that allows for conversion of the AVI files into RealMedia Files (to both save space and avoid having to download a special player for playback).

Hi Bob,

We would like to introduce our new freeware which can record screen activity into standard AVI movie files. It is an ideal tool for developing videos to demonstrate features of a new software, for creating movies used in user training or any other task that requires the capture of desktop activity.

The program is easy to use, and you can select an area or full desktop for recording. You can adjust the video quality settings to reduce file size, use custom cursors and add a soundtrack through your microphone.

[Name and version of app ] 
CamStudio 1.1

[Link to homepage of app] http://www.atomixbuttons.com/vsc 

[System requirements] Microsoft Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000 or later. 400 MHz processor . 64 MB RAM 4 MB of hard-disk space for program installation.

[Download link] http://www.atomixbuttons.com/vsc/setup.exe 

RenderSoft Software [jupboo@pacific.net.sg] 

The FAQ site has a nice explanation of hardware acceleration problems that can arise when playing back any AVI files on newer computers --- http://www.atomixbuttons.com/vsc/ 

When I play back a full-screen AVI file using Windows Media Player by double clicking it, the text and graphics becomes blurred.

There are two main reasons for the movie being blurred.

One is that you are using Windows Media Player to play back a movie that has a frame size that is as big or bigger than the screen. 

In this case, Windows Media Player will shrink the picture to fit it on the screen. This cause the  text and graphics to be blurry. To view the movie in full quality, you will need to switch Windows Media Player to full screen playback, or switch your monitor to a higher resolution .

You may also record a smaller region to avoid this problem. Otherwise you may need to use the Movie Player software that is distributed with the CamStudio package to playback the movie.

Another reason for the cause of the unclear image is the use of Lossy Codec as your compressor. This means the compressor will degrade the quality of your picture to reduce the size of your AVI file.

To remedy this, you may either set the Quality settings in Video Options to a higher value, or use a Lossless Codec for your compressor (e.g Microsoft RLE is a lossless codec that is available only in the display mode of 256 colors).


When I press the F9 key to stop the recorder when the program is minimized, the save dialog does not appear.

Try minimizing all other windows on your desktop. The save dialog window is probably hidden behind them.


Can I use the AVI files recorded with CamStudio for commercial purposes ?

Yes, of course. The AVI files created with CamStudio may be used for any purposes, including commercial purposes. You may sell your recorded .AVI files or charge users for products that include those AVIs.



How come when I try to record something playing in Windows Media Player (or Real Player or Apple QuickTime), it comes out blank?

This is because hardware acceleration is being used in these players. You may want to disable hardware acceleration in these players :

Windows Media Player 7:
Choose Tools:Options (and select the Performance tab). Set the Hardware Acceleration slider to None.

Windows Media Player 6.4 and earlier:
Choose View: Options : Playback. Set the Hardware Acceleration slider to None.

Apple QuickTime:
Choose Edit : Preferences : Streaming Transport. Select Video Settings in the combobox and uncheck all DirectDraw options.

RealPlayer G2:
Choose Options/Preferences (and select the Performance tab). Uncheck the "Use Optimized Video Display" setting.

Disabling Hardware Acceleration System Wide
Another solution is to disable hardware acceleration for your whole system.

To do this on Windows 2000, go to the Control Panel, choose Display : Properties : Settings : Advanced : Troubleshooting. Set the Hardware Acceleration slider to None.

For other versions of Windows, go to the Control Panel, choose System, (and under the performance tab), choose Graphics : Advanced. Set the Hardware Acceleration slider to None.



When I record my DVD player, the output is blank.

DVD players usually require hardware acceleration to run. You may not be able to capture movies from your DVD player.



My Win 2000 system freezes when I record with CamStudio.

Try turning off system wide hardware acceleration and reducing the input frame rate of CamStudio.

Turning off system wide hardware acceleration :
Please read FAQ above on how to go about in disabling system wide hardware acceleration.

Reducing Frame Rate:
In CamStudio, go to Options : Video Options and increase the value of "Capture Frames Every __ milliseconds"



When I click the Record button, I get an "Error Creating AVI file" message.

Try going to Options : Video Options, and select a different compressor.



I am recording a game with its sound effects and music. The video comes out fine but how come the audio is missing ?

CamStudio 1.1 can only record audio from the microphone. If you need to record the audio playing in the speakers, one suggestion is to place your microphone near your speakers.


How can I optimize the video settings to get the best results ? Can you suggest a good video setting ?

One setting which gives very good frame rates is to use 256 color display mode with MS RLE as Compressor.

Futhermore, in Options: Video Options

• Set the Capture Frame Every value to 5
• Set the Set Key Frames Every value to be 200
• Set Playback Rate to 200

In general, you should adjust the Set Key Frames Every and Playback Rate to be equal 1000/Capture Frame Every. For example, if Capture Frame Every is 5, then the Playback Rate should be 1000/5 = 200.

However, if you are creating a time-lapse movie, (in which your Capture Frame Every is a very large value), you may want to set the Playback Rate to be around 20 to 30 frames/second.



I have fininshed recording with CamStudio and would like to trim/cut some of the frames in the AVI. Are there any freeware video editors that can do this?

VirtualDub is a great freeware video editor for editing AVIs. Download it at http://www.virtualdub.org/index



I am trying to record a DOS application by switching to it from Windows, and it seems to be impossible as all I get is some sort of fuzzy stuff in the playback.

CamStudio cannot record your DOS application when it is running in full screen DOS mode. Try recording your DOS application in windowed mode.

You can make your full-screen DOS application into a window by pressing CTRL-ESC when you are in DOS mode. This will return you to the Windows screen. If you look at the task-bar, you will notice a new item "MS-DOS prompt". By right-clicking on this item, and selecting Properties, a dialog box will be displayed. Choose the Screen tab and under Usage, select Window and click "OK". Your DOS screen will now become a window. You can start recording from here and the output should be fine.



Does CamStudio record DirectX, OpenGL applications and special windows such as the Office Assistant in MS Word?

This actually depends on your system. For most cases, CamStudio should be able to record DirectX and OpenGL programs if they are running in windowed mode rather than full-screen mode.

( I successfully recorded the Office Assistant in one computer running Win Me, but could not do so in another with Win 2000 installed. )



I need to save in the QuickTime or Mpeg format. How can I do that with CamStudio ?

CamStudio does not save videos in the QuickTime or Mpeg movie format directly. You will need third party software to do the conversion.

For Quicktime movies, you may use QuickTime Pro from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

For Mpeg, there is a free AVI to MPEG converter on the internet.   Click here for free AVI to MPEG1 converter




How can I convert AVI files to Windows Media files (.ASF  .WMV) for streaming on the Internet.

You may use the free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7 to convert AVI files to ASF or WMV format.

Windows Media Encoder is available without charge at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/wm7/encoder.html



When I record a large window, the computer becomes very slow. How can I capture a large window fast enough?

Capturing a large frame and compressing it are time-intensive operations. Your computer may not be fast able to handle such frame rates at these sizes.

You can try to

• make the size of the capture region smaller
  
• reduce the number of colors for the display mode
  
• decrease the input frame rate (by making the value of Capture Frame Every __ Milliseconds in Video Options larger)
  

I have downloaded your source code and found them very interesting. Would you tell me how the function XXX in file YYY works ?

Please do not direct technical questions related to the source code to us.



I am a programmer. How can I implement the feature of adding text/graphics overlay into the movie ?

You may want take a look at the functions

captureScreenFrame
InsertHighLight

in the file vscapView.cpp of the source code to see how we implemented the drawing of highlights into a frame of the AVI movie. The addition of text/graphics overlay should be very similar.

One of the most frequently asked questions asked in my education technology workshops is as follows:  
"In what ways should course content materials be modified for online learning?"

My quick and dirty response is that faculty who develop content should learn how to use FrontPage or some other good HTML editor and then learn how to screen capture and video capture themselves rather than relying upon technicians.  You can learn Microsoft FrontPage, screen capturing, and Camtasia video capturing in just a few days with a little help from your friends.  With a little added effort, you can make your online course materials more interactive by saving Excel worksheets as interactive Webpages and by learning how to use JavaScript.  You can learn all of these things in less than a week if you have the correct software and hardware.

1. Use more screen captures, audio captures, and video captures of things that you normally demo in lecture presentations.   Look under "Resources" at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm 
   Also see my tutorials at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 
   
   
2. MP3 Audio
   Audio capturing is especially important since you can let students hear what you like to say in lectures or case discussions.  For example, in an Excel spreadsheet you can add buttons that students can click on to hear your explanation of what is going on in various cells of the spreadsheet.  Look under "Resources" at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm 
   
   
3. Camtasia AVI Versus RM Recordings --- See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 
   Flash in PowerPoint, Excel, or other presentations with video and audio.  Camtasia works great for both capturing dynamic computer screen presentations in video accompanied by your audio explanations.  Your video files may take up more space than you are allowed on your Web server.  However, you can save them to CD-R or CD-RW disks that can be sold to students for around $1.00 per disk. You can learn more about Camtasia from http://www.techsmith.com/ .  You can make CDs by simply dragging files to a blank CD using Windows Explorer if you first install Easy CD (http://www.roxio.com/en/products/ecdc/ ).  
   
   For video illustrations and tutorials, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 
   
   
4. Excel Saved as Webpages Can Add Interactivity In Imaginative Ways
   Suppose that you want to have students make journal entries in a HTML Webpage.  Or suppose you want to see the impact of interest rate swap valuations with changes in forward yield curve estimates. 
   
   Or suppose you want an interactive Excel chart imported into a HTML Webpage where the chart will change when the reader changes the loan principal, interest rate, or maturity date. 
   
    

   Saving an XLS file as a HTM file is Quite Simple

   Create an Excel file that has some formulas and/or graphs derived from numbers in cells.  First save the file as an "xls" file.  Then re-open your Excel file.    Click on "Save file as" and then choose an "*.htm" file rather than an "xls" file.   A new screen will appear that has a button called "Publish".  Click on this button.   A new screen will appear with a box where you can click in the box for "Add interactivity".  Choose a name for the file and then click on the "Publish" button at the bottom of the page.   You now have an "htm" file that will read interactively on Internet Explorer browsers (not usually other types of browsers like Foxfire).  What was once coded in Visual Basic in Excel is now coded in DHTML that can be read by Internet Explorer.   Users will be able to change numbers and see the answers change in formulas.  If you have graphs, users can change the numbers and watch the graphs change.   When you make your original Excel spreadsheet, you should type in instructions guiding users to where they can change the numbers.    Your htm version will not read comments that you placed in your xls file as "Comments" and it will not run any macros that you had in your xls file.    You can read this htm file in FrontPage and fix it up somewhat with headings and text.  You cannot change your interactive numbers and graphs without going back to your original xls file.

   
   
   For illustrations on publishing Excel workbooks, spreadsheets, or charts as interactive Webpages, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/dhtml/excel01.htm 
   
   I have video instructions on how to create these files in the ExcelDHTML.wmv file under ACCT 5342 at  http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/ 
   
   
   

5. JavaScript Calculations and Interactivity
   Try to make your online materials more interactive by saving Excel workbooks as interactive Webpages and use of JavaScipt.  For my JavaScript tutorials, see  http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm .  
   
   For more advanced training in Javascripting see
   (http://www.ascendtraining.com/outline.php?id=268)
   

"Building Programming Tutorials with Codecademy," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/building-programming-tutorials-with-codecademy/38378?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

For those learning to code this year, either for professional reasons or to expand personal horizons, Codecademy has been a popular tool. Jason has written about Codecademy as a platform for code-literacy, and I discussed the Codeyear “new year’s resolution” initiative the site launched in January. Now the platform has expanded even further with the addition of tools that allow any user to create new courses and projects in JavaScript, Python and Ruby.

Codecademy may not be a substitute for more traditional forms of programming instruction, but this new platform does offer possibilities for shaping hybrid learning or building coding familiarity into a course dedicated to another topic, as customized tutorials could supplement face to face instruction. Julie Meloni makes some great points about the pedagogical problems of Codecademy and the question of results: “…it is not teaching you how to code. It is teaching you how to call-and-response, and is not particularly helpful in explaining why you’re responding, why they’re calling, or—most importantly—how to become a composer.” I share a number of these concerns, particularly when Codecademy is the only source of knowledge–and I hope that this new tool affords Codecademy the opportunity to crowdsource new approaches to pedagogy.

There are some great examples of instructional programming tools available for free on the web, such as Scratch, MIT’s young-learner friendly code “building blocks.” (Scratch is just one kid-targeted programming tool: there are other great suggestions at Digital Humanities Q&A.) But these are often starter languages that don’t directly apply to web development or other applications, and thus require additional investment before literacy in more widely-used languages is achieved.

The choice of languages in Codecademy’s toolset focuses on utilitarian scripting languages with a range of potential applications. As Ryan Cordell noted in Ruby for Humanists, Ruby is a great starting language and its inclusion is particularly promising. As Ryan mentioned, there’s already a site for learning programming basics through Ruby tutorials: Hackety Hack. But Codecademy moves a step further with an easy system for building and sharing interactive tutorials.

Continued in article

4Teachers: Teach with Technology --- http://www.4teachers.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on new and old tools are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#NewTools

1. Amy Dunbar's Online Pedagogy
   Make a lot more use of online questions and answers that replace the question and answer type of style that you probably use in lectures.  Amy Dunbar uses this approach extensively.  You can read about how she developed her first online course.  See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#Motivations 

Excel Tips and Helpers (Including Videos)

Excel's New Power Pivot

December 9, 2009 message from AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU

This is a free add-in from Microsoft for Excel 2010

Below are some videos discussing this powerful tool.

http://www.powerpivot.com/videos.aspx 

Richard J. Campbell School of Business 218 N. College Ave. University of Rio Grande Rio Grande, OH 45674
Voice:740-245-7288 http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell

Bob Jensen's video helpers for Excel and MS Access ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/

Pivot Tables Should Be Used More Often

Roberta has a new article on pivot tables.
"Make Exel and Instant Know-It All," by Robert Ann Jones, Journal of Accountancy, March 2004, pp. 40-43 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2004/jones.htm 

You’re sitting at your computer working on a spreadsheet that displays revenue generated by individual salespersons. Your CEO, hovering anxiously at your elbow, asks you for one employee’s third-quarter sales total. You sort the Salesperson column and then the Order Date column. Then you write you write a formula to identify third-quarter sales. Finally, you sum the order amounts and give your boss the number he wants. Just as you congratulate yourself for coming up with the answer in less than three minutes, he says, “OK, now compare that with the results of the whole sales team.”

You roll your eyes in frustration, scrap all the work you just did and re-sort the columns and rows and write a new set of formulas.

There has to be a better way, you think.

And there is. Instead of repeatedly sorting columns and rows and customizing formulas to answer each question your boss asks, you take a new tack: Immediately after you initially put the worksheet data together you can spend a minute or two using Excel’s PivotTables, which will let you easily reconfigure the data with a mouse so you can produce near-instant answers to most any question about them.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's Excel Tips and Videos (Pivot Tables and Charts)
Did you know that Microsoft Corporation presents some of its financial history in Excel pivot tables?  You can download the Excel Workbooks containing pivot tables from "Financial History" at  http://www.microsoft.com/msft/tools.htm 

I also found a link to the 1999 Microsoft financial reports --- these had much better Pivot table than the Years 2000-2005 annual reports. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar99/lts.htm 

The Year 2005 Microsoft Annual Report pivot tables are at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/history.mspx
Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

For extensions into OLAP (including the Microsofts FinWeb),  see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm 

I prepared a video on how to download and use the Microsoft pivot tables.  The video can be downloaded from PivotMicrosoft.rm

I also have a video illustrating how to make a pivot table at  PivotTable01.rm

In addition, I provide a video illustrating how to make a pivot chart at PivotChart01.rm 

Budgeting with Pivot Tables --- www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=9748&d=47 
A tutorial on using Excel pivot tables to create a budget, created by David Carter of Accounting Web

Also see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010346331033.aspx

See other videos linked at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 

Excel Tips (Goal Seek)
This is a nice feature used by Dr. Hubbard and me when we derived the yield curves consistent with interest rate swap values in Example 5 in Appendix B of FAS 133.  Both an narrative in 133ex05.htm and an Excel workbook 133ex05a.xls  illustrating the derivation of yield curves can be found at  http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/ 

I prepared a video illustrating the use of the Goal Seek utility in Excel at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/ 
The goal seek video is named ExcelGoalSeek.rm 

See other videos linked at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 

Excel Tips (Conditional Formatting)
This is a nice article discussing a feature of Excel that I never tried before reading this article.  

"Vigilant Spreadsheets, by Charles Kelliher and Lois S. Mahoney (both authors are faculty members at the University of Central Florida), Journal of Accountancy, November 2001, pp. 41-45 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2001/kelliher.htm 

Would you like to be able to scan your company’s financial operations spreadsheet and instantly see which departments are over budget or behind schedule or which accounts receivable are past due? There’s an easy way to do that in Excel, which can automatically flag cells that meet most any condition you establish. You can set the cells to display different formatting flags—colors, font styles, shading, patterns, underlining—with each custom format identifying a specific financial condition. For example, you can program Excel to flag costs that are over budget by displaying them as red; under-budget costs may appear blue.

The Excel function that does this job is conditional formatting. What makes the function especially handy is that it’s not static—that is, when the data in the worksheet change, the cells instantly reflect that by taking on the appropriate formatting.

To set up the function, first highlight the cells you want to include. Then click on Format, Conditional Formatting, which brings up the dialog box shown in exhibit 1 (of the article).

I prepared a video illustrating the use of the Conditional Format utility in Excel at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/ 
The conditional formatting video is named ExcelConditionalFormat.rm 

See other videos linked at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 

Illustrations of How to Publish an Interactive Excel Workbooks and Charts in HTML --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/dhtml/excel01.htm 

See other videos linked at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideosSummary.htm 

Question
How can an Excel spreadsheet be turned into a Flash file?

Answer from Richard Campbell

This is a link to a demo of a product called Excelsius. You can convert an Excel spreadsheet to a highly interactive Flash file. Each of the demos is powered by an underlying Excel file.

http://www.infommersion.com/demos.html 

Richard J. Campbell 
mailto:campbell@rio.edu 

"Spreadsheets With Something Extra," by Lois S. Mahoney and Judith K. Welch, The Journal of Accountancy, February 2003 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/feb2003/mahoney.htm 

Have you ever created a spreadsheet only to open it a couple of months later to discover you couldn’t remember how to update it or what data it needed? Or, if you prepared the spreadsheet for others in your organization, did they keep calling you for instructions on how to use it? You can eliminate those problems and, as a by-product, ensure the accuracy of spreadsheets by enhancing them with easy-to-create graphic messages and input boxes that can provide reminders, explain various functions of the data tables, help users find and enter the right data and even refuse to let them proceed unless they follow a prescribed procedure. In short, those boxes serve as automated stand-ins for the spreadsheet creator, who can design them to appear whenever a user opens the spreadsheet. Though you have to write message and input boxes in the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, which is built into Microsoft Excel, you will be happy to know it is easy to learn.

Excel Tip: 
Navigating Numerous Sheets in Your Workbook http://www.accountingweb.com/item/97003 

"Link (Dynamically) a Word Document to Excel," by Stanley Zarowin, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, Page 92 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2004/tech_qa.htm#Q1 

Question
I often make presentations based on last-minute sales data. It gets really wild when I have to copy last-minute numbers from the spreadsheet and quickly drop them into a Word document for the presentation. I sure hope there’s a better way.

Answer
There is, and it’s fast and simple. I’ll show you how to dynamically link the Excel spreadsheet to your Word document so that when you make any change in the spreadsheet it instantly and automatically will appear in the document. Caveat: Both the spreadsheet and the document must be in the same folder (subdivision).

Go to the article for the remainder of the answer!

JavaScript Illustrations and Coding Explanations

All or some of the illustrations in this document may not work in your browser. Your browser must be enabled for JavaScript. All of the illustrations work in my Netscape Navigator browser. All of my examples work in my Microsoft Internet Explorer, but some will not work in Internet Explorer. I want to acknowledge the help of Tom Hicks for his demonstrations of JavaScript in some of my classes. He provides some examples under (Searching, Tutorials, JavaScript Presentations) at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~thicks/

• Tutorial 1a: Opening New Documents in an Existing Window

• Tutorial 1b: Opening New &Resized Windows With Close Buttons

• Tutorial 1c: JavaScript for Multiple New Windows in Succession

• Tutorial 02: Automatic Scrolling and Frame Scrolling

• Tutorial 03: Window Prompt and Confirm Functions

• Tutorial 04: JavaScript for Form Fields (Buttons, Check Boxes)

• Tutorial 5a: JavaScript Illustrating an Insecure Password Option
  (This tutorial runs in my Netscape browser, but it will not run in Internet Explorer)
  
  
• Tutorial 5b: JavaScript Illustrating a Secure Password Option
  (This tutorial runs in my Internet Explorer, but it will not run in my Netscape broswer)
  
  
• Tutorial 06: JavaScript for Form Field Text Boxes and Buttons
  
  
• Tutorial 07: JavaScript for Arithmetic and Mathematics
  
  
• DHTML Illustrations and Macromedia Dreamweaver Illustrations
  I have an Excel spreadsheet embedded in an HTML document that illustrates how students can change the data in one or more cells and then see the outcomes change in other parts of the spreadsheet and graphs. The important thing is that they can do these dynamic changes in the web browser without downloading an Excel file and then having to run the file in Excel.  They never have to leave the web browser.  This is a new feature of Excel 2000.  You can do the same thing with MS Access databases.  It only takes about five minutes to learn how to do this.  The illustrations and instructions (including a Macromedia Dreamweaver Illustration 4) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/dhtml/excel01.htm.

Hi Dan,

Fortunately, JavaScript is much, much easier to learn than Java and DHTML. JavaScript is an easy way to add user interactions on your Web documents. The next step up is DHTML, but DHTML is difficult to program and adds about ten times as much code to your document (ToolBook uses DHTML templates and Microsoft uses DHTML for interactive Excel Web documents). I guess the next step up is Java, but you must devote your life if you want to become a Java programmer.

I would begin with my tutorial illustrations at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#JavaScript 

For a more complete set of tutorials, go to http://www.pageresource.com/jscript/  
Note the tutorial listing at http://www.pageresource.com/jscript/index4.htm

Free book --- http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/bridge/1998/res/javascript/javascript-tutorial.html 

Never trust JavaScript for password protections. These are never as secure as password protections in Java and other more sophisticated codes.

Other suggestions include the following:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/03/index0a.html 

http://www.webteacher.com/javascript/ 

http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp 

http://www.echoecho.com/javascript.htm 

There are a variety of books that pretty much have the same content. One popular book is Netscape Visual JavaScript For Dummies by Emily A. Vander Veer.

Bob

-----Original Message----- 
From: Dan Gode [mailto:dgode@stern.nyu.edu]  
Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2002 1:48 AM 
To: Jensen, Robert Subject: Javascript

Bob:

What is the best way to learn javascript?

Dan

September 14 reply from Dan Gode with respect to my comment above about password protection.

Thanks a lot for your detailed help. If you want to have fun, check out http://www.elcomsoft.com

Dan

• Other Illustrations (Chapters 18-27)
  

• JavaScript References

Java and JavaScript Operators and Expressions

A summary of MathObject functions can be found at http://www.webnet.fr/javascript/builtin.htm#1005050

Reserved words are listed at http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/support/training/tutorials/1997/08-19/P029.html

Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript, Second Edition

JavaScript Guide

Tom Hicks Illustrations --- Click on (Searching, Tutorials)

Danny Goodman's JavaScript Tutorials
I added a very helpful link to Danny Goodman's JavaScript tutorials.  I highly recommend both his free Web tutorials and his great JavaScript book.  Web page designers should definitely learn how easy its become to use JavaScript (not to be confused with Java).    Go to http://www.dannyg.com/javascript/ 

Danny Goodman was featured on the PBS Computer Chronicles television show on October 4, 2001.  He pointed out how there are many JavaScript plug-ins that do not require coding (actually scripting in the case of JavaScript).  With JavaScript you do not have to be a computer programmer like you have to become for Java from Sun Corporation.  JavaScript was actually developed by NetScape for purposes of creating dynamic Web pages.

Also see 

JavaScript Bible --- http://developer.netscape.com/docs/books/idg/jsbible/jsbible.html 
JavaScript Basics --- http://www.webword.com/interviews/goodman.html 
JavaScript Arrays --- http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/goodman_arrays.html 
Yahoo's JavaScript Helpers --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Programming_Languages/JavaScript/ 
Bob Jensen's JavaScript Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

Some Trinity University Photographs

• murch.jpg

• coates.gif

• halsell.gif

• laurie.gif

• library2.gif

• moody.gif

• northrup.gif

Miscellaneous Helpers

• Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
• Bob Jensen's Glossaries --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 
• Bob Jensen's Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 
• Bob Jensen's Homepage (including helpers for educators) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/