The field of online pedagogy has sparked a great deal of study and lots of opinions over what works and what doesn't. One generally agreed upon principle is that students must be engaged with the material in order to make the learning meaningful. Although no single workshop can hope to offer a solution as to how to successfully engage students, this workshop will provide an overview of one tool that may help foster that engagement with the course content. Camtasia is a product developed by TechSmith to capture screens as they change, creating a fluid series of screen shots that can be edited and even narrated as they cycle through their sequence. This results in a video that may prove to be a successful tool in engaging students in your material. Obviously it is not a tool for every student or every subject, but it can prove useful for some students for some subjects.

The links above connect to low and high resolution samples (approximately 16mb and 44mb respectively), a graphical overview of Camtasia, a PDF copy of the PowerPoint presentation, the storyboard used for the updated tutorial, and some basic principles of multimedia education (also in a PDF format).

TechSmith includes a series of tutorials including basic Studio 4 usage vidoes, Studio 4 video tips and all of the written documentation that comes n the package.

In addition to online tutorials, the newest version of Camtasia will allow users to save their files as Podcasts. If you own an iPod and would like to "subscribe" to the four videos used for this demonstration you can click on "Subscribe to Podcast" and all four should be downloaded to your computer. If you do not have an iPod, or do not want to subscribe, you can still view the Podcasts if you have the free Quicktime viewer installed by clicking on the links below. (If you do not have Quicktime installed then the first file you click on will start a process allowing you to install the software.)