Ed Tech Tuesday: Camtasia

For this month's Ed Tech focus, I'll be discussing the video editing tool Camtasia. This is the tool I personally use for all my video creations and editing so I'm looking forward to this discussion!

Video is a powerful tool in online education. It can be used for so many different things. It's especially great when it comes to creating screencasts and recorded lectures for your students.

Camtasia is an awesome and robust tool that helps you create and edit videos professionally. It’s also relatively simple to learn, which makes it perfect for those just getting started in video editing. There are a few key features I want to point out:

You can record your screen or webcam footage with Camtasia, so if you would like to show slides as part of your video lecture but don't have the time or skillset for graphic design, this will work well for you! You can just use your regular lecture slides to record yourself explaining them.

You can also use Camtasia to create a "video slide show" where you simply record the slides as they appear on your screen and then add narration later, which is perfect if you have a lot of content or information that may be too much for students to take in all at once.

Camtasia also offers the ability to record with or without your webcam or even record only audio if you wanted to create a podcast-type lecture.

Camtasia also allows you to add in music as well as sound effects, annotations, shapes and images. You can also include a variety of transitions between slides and even have clickable objects in your videos!

Although Camtasia is not a free tool, it is a pretty reasonable price compared to other video editing programs. There is also a free trial option so you can give it a go without investing anything before you decide if this is the right tool for your needs!

One of the great things about Camtasia is the variety of tutorials they have available online, which makes it really easy to learn how to use.

So, do you use video in your online courses? If so, what kind of videos do you make and why? And if not, how come? The Online Educator Facebook Group!