teaching people

Have: Laptop & Camtasia, iPad 2 Need: Recording of tasks on an iPad

My challenge:

Produce a draft of a video showing a simple task on the iPad. Nothing fancy, just enough so I can follow my demo my visually. Budget for iPad recording software is 0$ Canadian.

On the iPad:

Create the screen prints on the iPad of each step. It puts it all in a folder, naming convention (IMG_####). You *do* need every single step, after each touch of the screen you take a screen shot. ( Hold down Home key and press the  Standby key once)

Move the Screenprints to the Laptop

1. Plug iPad into Laptop.
2. Copy all screen prints into a folder on the PC.
3. Open the first screen print in Windows Live Photo Gallery. (The naming convention ensures you can just run through them in the sequence they were taken)
4. I ran through them once to make sure I had all the screens I needed and deleted one or two I did not need.

Recording your “movie”

In Camtasia.

1. Your recording settings are customized to the size of the screen print.
2. Your cursor settings are editable in camtasia.

Cursor effects are editable in Camtasia Studio

In Camtasia: Mouse cursor visible was unchecked. Spotlight, Warp.

editable settings for cursor in camtasia

1. Start your recording. (The first iPad screenprint is open.)
2. You are now following your course step by step with your mouse. ( I move the mouse out of view using the shortest route, which may or may not be the best way, I will play with it more to see what creates the easiest viewing. )
3. As you need to just scroll through the screenprints in sequence, using the mouse as you would your finger on the iPad.  ( OK I did not say fast I said cheap. )
4. End the recording and edit the movie in camtasia, you may need to cut out some parts and extend others.

Overall this gave me a good enough product to evaluate the learning steps I had planned for the small course. It also fit my budget.

I then produced the video for the iPad, and was able to share it  via screencast.

Future Plans

As the video is not for public viewing I am going to create a new sample to demonstrate the steps for this post.

For an introduction to hand movements for the touch screen, I am considering the use of Photoshop to add a hand to the screen prints. All I need are free drawings of the different hand movements.