#Flysketch software software#
#Flysketch software series#

Of course you could also use a blank MS Word document, or any other blank white window or screen. This is going to be the “whiteboard” itself. With those tools, here is the workflow I follow for making a whiteboard screencast.įirst, open up Keynote and make a single, blank white slide. With my upcoming job change, I have to hand that in when I leave, so I plan on picking up a Bamboo Pen & Touch this fall. I currently a Wacom Graphire tablet purchased with a grant a few years ago. See the link for screenshots and a more detailed description. FlySketch puts a transparent overlay on top of any existing objects on your computer screen and allows you to draw freehand, draw geometric shapes, or type text on the overlay.

#Flysketch software software#

FlySketch, a software app from Flying Meat (they also make the popular personal wiki software VoodooPad).

Camtasia, which we saw in the last post in this series.

I use four main tools for doing whiteboard screencasts: But a lot of people ask me about the tools I use to make whiteboard screencasts, so hopefully this will be worth it.

This is where it gets technically somewhat complicated. Once the screencast is properly planned, it’s time to put it together. If you think about it, this is just the same kind of planning that goes into a successful whiteboard lecture, so this process is not entirely alien to instructors. I work those examples all the way through to ensure that there are no math or other mistakes and that I don’t get stuck in one of my own calculations. Additional topics go into additional screencasts. So I will start a whiteboard screencast with something like a mind-map of the topic or topics I intend to address and one, maybe two, examples of that topic.

(If I were better at ad-libbing, that might be different.) Very little of what I do in a whiteboard screencast is ad-libbed. I don’t always read words from a script, but in order to make the screencast logical and coherent, I do storyboard what I am going to do and practice with the drawings, erasures, and such. Because it’s easy for me to get carried away when talking about something that matters to me, I find it very helpful to work out in advance everything that I am going to do in the screencast, in the order and position on the screen that I intend to do it. For whiteboard screencasting, which is more free-form than lecture capture using Keynote or PowerPoint, the scripting process has to be a little more rigorous. You first have to engage in basic planning, which involves defining a tight and coherent scope for your screencast and writing out a script.

The basic principles of whiteboard screencasts are the same as for other screencasts. This is a really powerful use of screencasts - students often want more examples than there is time for in a class meeting, and whiteboard screencasts give me a way to give students as many examples as they can dream up. I use them sometimes for presenting hand calculations for students to watch and work through before class, and sometimes (probably more frequently) I use them to create additional examples for things I’ve covered in class. I do whiteboard screencasts fairly often. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen a Khan Academy video before, here’s one: Of course the most well-known examples of “whiteboard” screencasts are the videos at Khan Academy.

It’s intended to mimic the live presentation of content on a whiteboard, hence my name for it. This is a screencast where I am demoing some sort of concept or calculation by writing things down, rather than clicking through a Keynote presentation or typing something on the screen.

#Flysketch software series#

In this post, the fifth in a series of posts on how I make screencasts, I’m going to focus on what I call the “whiteboard” screencast.