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Social Media 202: Screencasting

Screencasting is a way of letting other people see what is on your computer screen. It lets you capture either the whole screen or a particular portion and create a movie file that you can upload to a video sharing service like YouTube or Facebook.

The benefits of a screencast are obvious, particularly for SMUG. Instead of a slideshow of a sequence of static screen shots uploaded to Slideshare.net and synched to a sound file (pretty good alliteration, huh?), we can now show and tell with full motion, so you can see exactly how to do things. Pictures are extremely helpful, but movies should make the teaching clearer and the learning easier.

But how do you (or I) turn my computer screen into a movie?

For Mac OSX, Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X is an excellent screencast software choice. It’s easy to use, and I was most pleased that it not only delivers great movies of my Mac screen, but also my Windows XP partition. You can see that example in this post on social sharing with WordPress.com. Unlike most of what you see in SMUG, Snapz Pro X isn’t free: it costs $69. But I think it’s worth it for the power it gives you.

Just to show how far you can go with this, I decided to do a demo screencast using Flip video of me addressing my fellow SMUGgles from the front porch of Old Main:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJepnorgdY]

Steps involved in this were:

Shoot the video of me talking using a Flip on a tripod.
Transfer the file to my Mac and open in QuickTime
Play the video at half-size, while capturing the surrounding 640 x 480 window using Spapz Pro X screencast software, and then saving to a QuickTime movie file.
Open that file and repeat the cycle, creating another QuickTime file that could again be played at half size.
After repeating a couple of more times to create the “hall of mirrors” effect, edit the pieces together using iMovie or Final Cut.

The point, besides having some fun showing a movie of a movie of a movie, was to show that through screencasting you can do show-and-tell training demonstrating anything on your computer screen.

Ironically, the only thing I can’t screencast using Snapz Pro X is a step-by-step introduction to using Snapz Pro X!

I still like Slideshare and will use it to some extent (particularly for the Snapz Pro X course), but I think a screencast can be a much more effective way to teach.

If you’re a Windows user, this list from Mashable has some screencast software alternatives.

What do you think? How could you use screencasting for your training programs?

RAQ – What is a SMUGgle?

Even though we don’t have our own sports teams (which helps us keep tuition down!), Social Media University Global still needs a nickname for our student body. Referring to the whole bunch as “SMUG students” has an unfortunate connotation, but until a few weeks ago it was the best I could do.

Then, in a comment on this post, Jim Streed suggested “SMUGgles” as the collective shorthand designation. For those who haven’t read the Harry Potter books, it’s a take-off on J.K. Rowling’s name for ordinary mortals, Muggles: those who lack magical powers.

And while “muggles” is sometimes used pejoratively by Harry’s peers, SMUGgles is a label we should all wear proudly. It reinforces one of the founding principles of our institution:

You don’t have to be a wizard to get magical results with these powerful tools.

Everything you see here is accomplished through free or ridiculously inexpensive services like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress.com, and with no professional IT support. And with SMUG you can work through the learning process step by step, until you feel confident using these tools in your organization.

But having chosen SMUGgle as our “team name,” that still left us with one problem. We all can picture a Cardinal, or a Blue Jay, or a Viking, but what does a SMUGgle look like? What could be our school mascot?

For now, we’re going with something that bears an eerie resemblance to the “I just joined Facebook” avatar that represents all of us on that social networking platform until we upload a picture. Somehow that seems appropriate, because it shows that SMUG is not only open to newbs, it’s intended for beginners.

But with that, I also want to renew the call for those, newb or not, who have artistic abilities and would like to design a new masthead and logo for SMUG. It would be great to have an official seal that incorporates our Latin motto, Suus Non Ut Diffucile, and if we could get an original drawing for the SMUGgle mascot, that would be fantastic, too.

If the Obama campaign can have an official seal complete with a Latin motto, why not SMUG? To borrow a phrase, “Yes, we can!”

I promise that once we select a SMUG seal, we’ll use it a lot longer than Obama did.

Doggy Dip and the Start of Volleyball

This post falls in the personal category, but just illustrates some of the fun you can have with social media.

On Thursday night my daughter Rebekah’s volleyball team (she’s a senior co-captain) started their season with a non-conference loss. Two years ago they were something like 5-20, and last year they improved to 15-14, the first winning record in a long time. This year, with lots of returning seniors, expectations are high.

Naturally, I’ve started a Facebook “booster” group to upload video and photos (and to link to local newspapers’ on-line stories), just as I did for last year’s state tournament team in basketball. Here’s a video from Thursday’s match which I uploaded to YouTube; it shows some of the team’s strengths:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fZngdOIuA]

Unfortunately there weren’t quite enough points like that on Thursday, but tomorrow they get a chance to even their record.

Meanwhile, last night was the third annual Doggy Dip at our Austin, Minn. municipal swimming pool. The day before they drain the pool and close for the season, the city opens the pool to the dogs for $2 each. It’s quite an event. Our dog, Gideon, who is a direct descendent of Shadow from the Homeward Bound movies, was much less dignified than his great-grandpa.

Gideon spent the first few minutes running around and barking. The guy next to me said, “Oh yeah, now I remember him.” He (Gideon, not the guy) also was pretty timid about jumping into the water until I shoved him (again, Gideon, not the guy) into the pool. Here’s the action:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TP6aQPuuU]

As you’ll see in the video response I uploaded, after a while Gideon got very comfortable jumping into the pool. I was bummed that the batteries on my Flip ran out long before Gideon lost the energy to chase his toy and bring it back barking for another run.

The Austin Daily Herald also ran a story about Doggy Dip.

All part of the interesting life in Norman Rockwell’s America.

Assignment:

Let’s play the “Who’s farthest away from Austin?” game.

Here’s where you’ll find Austin on the map:

I’m inviting the first commenter to indicate the city from where you are reading this (e.g. Chicago, Ill.)

As others read it, if you are farther away than the previous commenter (or think you might be about the same distance), leave a comment with the name of your city.

The goal is to show just how far away people are seeing this video.

Yeah, we know that theoretically the reach is world-wide. But just for fun, let’s prove it.

Blogging 115: The Blogroll

A blog’s Blogroll plays two main roles. When you add a link to your blogroll you are typically either saying:

“I have found this site helpful, and I would like to share it with you” or
“Here is a blog that covers some of the same subject matter as mine, and if you like my blog you might also enjoy this one.”

So politically oriented blogs tend to include like-minded others in their blogroll, for example. And blogs that are about social media often have blogroll links to others that have a similar focus.

The SMUG blogroll has been rather spartan because I haven’t updated it for about 18 months. Here’s how it looked before I began this post:

So I’m taking the opportunity of this course to both demonstrate blogroll management and to bring the SMUG blogroll up-to-date. Or actually, it’s what it looked like immediately after I did this first addition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvd4jJhQr0]

Here are some more blogs that fit both of the above criteria, and which I’m therefore adding to my blogroll:

Allfacebook
Blog Council
Buzzmachine
Commoncraft
Communication Overtones
Don’t Get Caught
Global Neighbourhoods
KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog
Scobleizer (Robert gave me the cue to use WordPress)
Social Media Club
Social Media Snippets
TechCrunch
Techmeme

These are only a Baker’s Dozen of the 230 or so feeds in my NetNewswire feed aggregator, but they’re the ones I think will be most interesting for the SMUG student body. I also added links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites (on Facebook, YouTube, our News Blog and our Podcast Blog.)

Also, this course is the first one for which I’m using a YouTube screencast instead of a Slideshare.net narrated slidecast. I’ll post about how I did it in a future course. I obviously have some things to learn to improve the quality of the screencast (and make it a snappier presentation), but I think having the ability to show exactly how to do things instead of narrating still frames will be really helpful in the show-and-tell courses.

Assignments:

Go to the sites linked above and subscribe to their feeds. See Social Media 102 on RSS feeds if you need a refresher.
If you have a blog, create or update your blogroll. You get extra credit points for adding Social Media University, Global.

Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups

Sites like CarePages and CaringBridge have been developed to meet important needs for hospitalized patients and their families and friends.

But Facebook, as a powerful general-purpose social networking site, may prove to be an even more useful alternative to these dedicated patient communication sites.

I will start by describing the very real needs CarePages and similar sites meet, and then discuss how Facebook can meet those needs.

Continue reading “Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups”