Parting ways with Jing - switching to Screencast-O-Matic

This week I received a couple of urgent emails from Screencast telling me that my Jing account was about to max out, and that if it did, people would no longer be able to access all the videos I had created on it. So I went to my Jing account and deleted old videos that I no longer needed. However, I then read the small print and realized that Jing has a limit on how many downloads can occur from one's Jing account -- and since my students and others have been watching my Jing "how to" videos more and more, my account was rapidly reaching the limit. Of course this is a clever scheme to get me to pay the $99 per year to enable to increase the storage I have on Screencast and the downloads. But I don't want to go there, as there are many other free options out there...

So, I just tried creating a video using Screencast-O-Matic, uploaded the video to my (free) YouTube account, and bingo -- it is really slick AND works better than Jing (the video I created in my last blog entry here -- on how creating an MP3 for Moodle from a Voice Memo -- I created using Screencast-O-Matic and uploaded to YouTube).

Screencast-O-Matic is really intuitive and easy to use. The first time I used it I had to download a plug in to enable it to work (just follow the prompts to do this), and then it was straightforward. Once I had created the video I had the option of  uploading the video to my Screencast-O-Matic account, uploading to my YouTube Account, or saving the video to my computer. I chose to upload to YouTube (and then I can link to it there or embed it into a page) and I also saved it to my computer.

Try it! I'm eager to hear from others out there about your experiences using Screencast-O-Matic, Jing and other video capture tools like Snagit (interestingly, Snagit is a product of TechSmith, which is the same company that makes Jing).

How to Convert Voice Memo (recorded on iPhone) into MP3 in iTunes and upload to Moodle

This week I had a question from one of my students about how to go about creating a voice recording and putting it into a Moodle course. I have recorded voice memos on my iPhone and before and emailed them to myself, but hadn't tried using these in a Moodle course before. So I decided to try this, and created a video to show how to do this.

I will also describe below the steps that I showed in this video in case you want to have them handy as you try out the process:

1. Using my iPhone VoiceMemo app I recorded myself speaking
2. From within the VoiceMemo app I selected the memo I had recorded, and emailed it to myself.
3. I opened my email, and downloaded the memo into my iTunes account on my computer
4. Next, in iTunes Preferences, I went to the Advanced settings --> clicked on the "Important settings" button and chose to import using MP3 encoder.
5. Still in iTunes I opened the memo (To find it in my iTunes account I went to "Recently added" where it showed up as the latest voice memo that I had downloaded)
6. I selected the memo and then under the "Advanced" file menu I chose "Create MP3 version" --> this saved a version of the voice memo in my iTunes account as an MP3 and added it in my list of Recently Added Voice memos.
7. I then clicked on this version and dragged and dropped it onto my desktop (making it easy to find when I wanted to upload it to Moodle)
8. Next I went to my Moodle course, selected the option to add a resource --> link to a file or website --> and followed the Moodle prompts to upload the MP3 voice memo (that I had dragged onto my desktop)
9. This memo then was uploaded into Moodle and could be played as an audio file directly in Moodle.