Products & Services We Use
(What keeps us ticking?)
Services
SonicFoundry's Mediasite Lecture Capture System (software & hardware)
Unique video presentation of lecture material (video and slides)
Mediasite Player gives students, employees and stakeholders the most engaging and flexible online experience to watch lectures and webcasts – unconstrained by viewing device or traditional webcast layouts. It also gives us a way to simultaneously capture a computer screen (or other vga device) and video with both the content sources synced up. Other features include: User-controlled layout, Flexible navigation, Powerful search, Interaction, Crystal clear images | High-resolution slides (up to 2048 x 1536), Embeddable Players, Accessibility friendly.
Join.me Screen Casting & online meetings / screen sharing/control used for Tutoring / Class Support
Instant screen sharing. Instant Aha! (and works GREAT!)
Gets everybody on the same page, when they're not in the same room, instantly. Review documents and designs. Train students. Demo products or just show off. join.me is a ridiculously simple screen sharing tool for meetings on the fly. Highlights: *FREE VERSION* and paid. (students can use this at home or student to student!) internet calling, screen sharing, 250 viewers, share control, multi-monitor, chat, send files, viewer: iPad/iPhone or Android
Vimeo.com - Low cost video publishing/streaming service provider.
No ads and secure content delivery through domain name lock. Change the way the player looks and offer up private review pages when developing content with multiple people.
Vimeo was founded by a group of filmmakers who wanted to share their creative work and personal moments from their lives. As time went on, likeminded people discovered Vimeo and helped build a supportive community of individuals with a wide range of passions.
Free and Paid Versions WITHOUT ADVERTSING.
Software
Clipwrap - re-wrap AVCHD into .mov editable mp4's h.264 without re-encoding.
MPEG Streamclip (PC/MAC) - MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.
Camtasia Screencapture Software - Lecture video/audio capture with laptop pc or mac. Great to use with calculations or screen demos. Make videos like Khan Academy! Auto-zoom feature based upon mouse location/clicks is highly utilized.
Quicktime Pro (ver7 NOT v10) - Low Cost ($30) PC & Mac compatible software that makes basic super fast edits, clips without intensive video processing required and re-encoding battles.
Acrobat Pro - Nearly every report and technical document uses a .pdf format. Acrobat is used primary for pdf optimization, simple edits and page extraction. Although there are other editors, Adobe has maintained a very good feature set. (costs are $$$$)
MindView - PC/Mac (mac = crippled version compared to PC). The only product that we know of that allows you to collect all the documents linked from within a mind map with 1 click. Much more then organizational charts, you can tie external documents and even calculated charts into branches, and re-distribute that information with all supporting documents kept in their native formats.
Hardware
HQ Video Camera - Panasonic AVCHD HMC150 - We entered the market just on the cusp of AVCHD professional cameras being available at a reasonable price. The HMC150 has worked excellent for all of our needs and then some. Solid design and well built components. 3 years after purchasing, we haven't seen a single glitch and have recorded over 400 hours of footage.
Canon TI - SLR Digital Camera - Don't be fooled by the small camera ads. This camera works best and hasn't failed in performing as a great visual content capture device. Works far better then a 'point+shoot' especially in low light (often found in mechanical rooms!)
Flip Camera - Decent HD quality videos in the palm of your hand coupled with a low cost you can't argue with. Too bad they're no longer around!!
Apple Computer - Rock solid. Better performance for multitasking. Virtual Environments (winxp & vista).
Wacom tablets - Professional grade surfaces and pens allows for digital entry of diagrams and hand written examples. Pens do NOT need batteries along with many other benefits over current competitors.
Lacie drives (2-terabyte or more) - Many companies to choose from for storage solutions but LaCie has previously proven to be solid and fast. Supports multiple connection types including USB 3, Firewire 800, eSATA.
Video Conferencing - When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, it is incrediably frustrating and instantly causes chaos and annoyance (worse then cell phone interference). We've had good luck using older TANDBERG (now part of cisco) units along with some of the newer LifeSize room. We've also dabbled into software codec versions that support 323 protocols with limited attempts and some general success. We've run 2 years worth of conferences using a TANDBERG Codian Bridge with excellent and consistent results. The calls were from east coast to west coast and connected 3 different types of video conferencing systems (lifesize, tandberg, polycom). The three major drawbacks we see are:
- 1) Cost - expect to pay $10,000 or more for one site
- 2) Bandwidth - if you don't have enough speed, it doesn't matter which equipment you buy
- 3) Incompatibilities with software video conferencing (skype, web based) Can't connect the two without expensive video bridging $60-80k!.
Learning Mangement System - Moodle
Official Moodle Documentation: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Main_Page
Moodle News: Tips, daily updates http://www.moodlemonthly.com/
Two Minute moodlettes – quick tips and video http://human.edublogs.org/moodle-tutorials-2-minute-moodles/
Book IN PRINT!