Week 9 of my Practicum

For the last few weeks I have been putting aside some time to work on a video describing my practicum experience for one of my professors. It was supposed to be between ten and fifteen minutes long. This not only sounds like a long video, it is a long video :) Unless you make a lot of videos or speeches, you never really know how much information you need to fill fifteen minutes. It is more than I thought.  When I finished writing what I thought would be around seven minutes of material, I timed myself. I did not even have five minutes. I got a little nervous about the time, but the video ended up being almost fourteen minutes.

The hardest part for me always is getting started. I usually have a tough time finding that one thing that will springboard me into the work. I have too many ideas floating around and I have to slow down and focus.  I decided to make a list of what I wanted to talk about and then make an outline. After I had my list, I went back and looked at the videos and tried to find ones that were shorter and did a good job of highlighting some of the capabilities of Camtasia 8.  I narrowed it down to two videos that would last just under three minutes in total.

Now that I had my videos, I began to plug in the details that explained my story.  I began by briefly talking about how I ended up with this practicum during this semester.  Next, I talked about how my semester began and how I was relaying information to my professors because both stories are probably not what you would think. The last two-thirds of the video were on Camtasia 8. It includes information about Camtasia 8 and two video tutorials that I made.

The actual making of the video went pretty smoothly, in my opinion.  I did not get past the first two minutes in the first five takes.  However, I ended up with my completed version by take eight. The editing process took a while. I inserted the two tutorial videos after I made the practicum video by simply splitting the recording and inserting the videos. This did cause a problem with my audio and visual being lined up, but I was able to fix that after a little tinkering. I also had to adjust the zoom when my tutorials were playing and adjust the size and location of my webcam.

I hope you enjoy the video: