Screen Capture: I've seen instances of this in action on how-to videos on YouTube, but knew nothing about how it was done. After reading about Jing, Screencast-O-Matic, Camtasia Studio and Lightshot, I now know how they do those videos. The great thing is that these tools all have free or trial versions to try them out. Jing and Camtasia Studio also have good tutorials...Camtasia's is very thorough. While Jing and Screencast-O-Matic both have free versions, the later has a longer recording time which could make a difference as to which one to try.
After learning about these tools, my first thought was of using one to do a little tutorial video of learning to use the library's OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). It's simple enough, yet someone using it for the first time is always hesitant....and they're so afraid of breaking something if they poke the wrong button.
I also thought of little tutorials on how to do helpful things on the computer, like making the text on a page larger or opening a second or third browser window. Those are things some of us do as a matter of course, but are new and wondrous to the less computer literate.
Podcasting: Many moons ago I had iTunes installed on my computer (it may still be there for all I know) and had it set to record certain podcasts. However, I never got around to listening to them so I abandoned it. I'll bet a lot of us don't realize there are other "podcast catching" programs available other than iTunes so I found the site listing the others helpful and have bookmarked it.
As far as creating podcasts, I really don't think that's in my future, though I do appreciate the reminder of Audacity. I understand it's an excellent audio recording/editing program. And best of all, being the tightwad I am, it's FREE. (Open source is great and all the open source programmers deserve a big round of applause.) While I don't expect to be doing any podcasting, I do have some old record albums and cassette tapes at home that I'd like to record to MP3.
It's too bad that CPD23 can give us all this wonderful inspiration but can't give us more hours in the day to make use of it all. Apparently what every library needs is a person who deals strictly with the computer/digital stuff....or a librarian who only has to work the desk a few hours a week yet gets paid to do this the rest of the time. We can dream, can't we??
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