Have you ever wondered how to record whatever you are doing on your computer screen? There are software tools that can help you do this. Five years ago, I had to rely on an IBM software called ScreenCam for this. Now, there are more user-friendly options.
Why would you want to record your computer screen, anyway? Well, screen-recordings are great educational tools. If you would like to teach someone to use a particular software, or how to do something in a computer, you could just record whatever you do and send them the recording.
There is an nice screen recording tool called CamStudio. The software is free. You could download it now and begin recording. Unfortunately, the recorded file is in AVI format, which is quite big and would not be easy to send as an email attachment. For instance, I recorded a few minutes of screen video and saved the file — it was a whopping 12mb for a 10 second file. There’s an option to save it into SWF (macromedia flash) but I couldn’t play it back. The filesize of the .swf file was also big.
Alternatively, there is another software called Camtasia Studio. This is a commercial software. You can download a free trial of the software and try it out. It also saves in either AVI or SWF format, but this time, I could adjust the file size of the output.
I tried out a few seconds of video (in flash swf format) and uploaded it in a website. So far, I could view it easily.
These tools are nice teaching tools that educators/facilitators can use. Check it out!