Camtasia for Creating Tutorials

After playing around with trials of these products a little bit, last week our library purchased Camtasia and SnagIt for us to use in creating online tutorials and trainings. I’m working right now to create a training session for all the librarians so we can all utilize these very cool toys to our advantage. The goal is for all librarians to be able to quickly make screen captures, demos, etc. for use in tutorials, subject guides, and anything else, without needing any support from our IT department.

I made the demo below in 5 minutes. Unfortunately the quality’s not great because I had to publish through Windows Media Player to upload to Google Videos; the standard is to create a Flash file but WordPress doesn’t allow for that right now. This is the simplest example – you can also add audio, add captions, bubbles, import other images & media, etc. I’ll get around to that soon enough but below is what I’m thinking for use in a tutorial on “Defining Your Research Topic.” It shows how you can use CQ Researcher to browse for topics:

P.S.  There’s also a free version called CamStudio – very simple and doesn’t include any editing features, but is great for creating short screen captures in Flash format.  Download it online for free here.