Author Archives: Mike Curtis

About Mike Curtis

Mike Curtis is an Educational Technologist at TechSmith. He works closely with the User Assistance team, doing what he can to help everyone be successful with our products.

Make the Most of your Interactive White Board

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Do you or someone you know have access to an Interactive White Board? Popular brand names include SMART, Promethean, and Epson. These boards are popular in many classrooms. You can display a computer screen or use it like an electronic white board. One problem though is that once the lesson is done, the board is cleared and the content is no longer available. Enter Jing, Snagit, or Camtasia! You can use TechSmith tools to record the interactive white board, thus freeing your content and Continue reading

An Easy Way to Scale Embedded Video on Screencast.com

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Previously, if you wanted to embed the video at a size other than its produced dimensions, you had to manually change the Screencast.com embed code. If you had non-standard dimensions, you may have had to do a little cross multiplication to keep the aspect ratio the same. (If you don't keep the aspect ratio the same the video will be squashed or stretched.) Screencast.com recently added a convenient feature that saves you from having to manually change the embed code and/or do math. When you're Continue reading

Digital Learning Day and TechSmith

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TechSmith is pleased to be a part of Digital Learning Day on February 6, 2013! Digital Learning Day is a national awareness campaign to celebrate the effective use of  technology to enhance learning. TechSmith is honored to not only be a sponsor, but more so, we're honored by the fact that our tools are making an impact in education. What is digital learning? The Alliance for Educational Excellence, the proponent behind Digital Learning Day, defines Digital Learning as: Any instructional Continue reading

How to Record Skype, Google Hangouts, and Webinars

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This post offers a wealth of information when it comes to recording things like webinars, Google Hangouts, and Skype calls. Before we dive in, I want to highlight two takeaways: If you have Windows XP, you may not be able to do this without a workaround/hack (more detail in the PDF). The TechSmith products that work best for this task are Snagit 11.1 on Windows, Camtasia for Mac 2.2, Camtasia Studio 7 or 8, and Camtasia Relay 4.1.1. Recording Guide We've put together three resources Continue reading

Watch Interactive Videos on Your iPad…Offline!

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Note: This method works for Camtasia Studio 8 and later, and Camtasia for Mac version 2.2 and later. It also requires a third-party $4.99 app from the App Store, but the benefit is that your interactive videos are playable offline (as opposed to just playing the MP4 video using the iPad's native player). This blog post is inspired by John Richards and an idea he shared on our community forum. John has a great deal of knowledge and pushes Camtasia Studio, often using it in creative ways with other Continue reading

Discovering the Trim Feature in Snagit

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The Trim feature is sort of like a "Smart Cropping" tool. It automatically removes excess, unused area from around the image. There are a few popular cases where the Trim tool can be handy in saving you from having to manually drag each edge of your canvas toward the edge of the image. As a rule of thumb, trim is great whenever you have labels, numbers, or callouts hanging "off" your central image. I made a quick, informal video showing a common workflow where Trim comes in handy. This example Continue reading

Host the Smart Player on Your Own Website

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Have you ever produced a video with Camtasia Studio 8 or Camtasia for Mac 2.2 and wondered, "What are all these extra files in my production folder?" I've got some good news: You only need to care about those extra files if you're hosting your video on your own website and you want the video to play in our Smart Player. (If sharing via Screencast.com, you don't need to worry about the files either--it will just work.) You might ask, "But Mike, it seems like extra work. Why do I care about Continue reading