Quick Screencast at the Desk
January 31st, 2007 by Greg R Notess
While I’m catching up, I thought I’d follow up on my process post from November. I still haven’t finished (or even worked on) the screencast I talked about in that post, primarily because our site was going to be changing and the steps I wanted to show would be changing as well. That change is not yet complete, so I’ll be waiting awhile to try that screencast. However, later on the same day that I posted, I was working at the reference desk and received a reference question on voice mail. The person left an email address, but the process to get to the wanted information had many steps — a perfect candidate for a screencast. Unfortunately, not only did I not have Camtasia available at the reference desk, but there is also no microphone. Nor could I see putting on a headset-microphone combination while I was supposed to be approachable at the desk.
So, I thought I might try Wink instead. I fairly quickly downloaded and installed Wink. Then I just recorded the steps as I wrote them up in a draft email as well. Then I produced the screencast and uploaded it to a Web server (fortunately, I did have access to my work Web server from the reference desk). Then I sent the email along with a link to the screencast (0.8MB, 1:10). I could have taken more time to add call-outs, but I thought it better to respond more quickly. I tried to make sure that each step was clear and had a couple seconds between. It seemed to work, at least based on the email thank-you response I received. I wonder if other situations like this will crop up. If so, that’s another reason to learn to be able to produce screencasts quickly.