I am back from my summer holiday now, where I walked from the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) across the whole country to Book Town (Hay-on-Wye). Books and walking - what's not to love?!

So here I am, refreshed and ready for the next Rudaí 23 Thing - videos. The task for this Thing was to record a screencast, upload it to YouTube, add subtitles and post it on our blogs with our thoughts on the process.

I had never recorded a screencast before, and was looking forward to playing around with some new technology. I looked at the software suggested in the original post (Jing and Screencast-o-Matic) as well as searching further afield. I discovered that I already had the means to record screencasts on my Mac through an app that comes pre-installed on all Apple computers - QuickTime. I played around with it, and it seemed to work well enough for a basic screencast. So I made a screencast on how to create screencasts using QuickTime*!

After uploading the video, YouTube was able to automatically generate subtitles for me (eventually - I think there might be a delay between uploading a video and when it is ready to be auto-subtitled), and after a quick proofread, my tutorial was ready to go! Have a look:

This solution works fine for me at home, but at work I would probably end up using Screencast-O-Matic from my work computer (a PC) as you don't need to install any software for it to work.

The potentials of using this technology at work are immediately obvious to me. Screencasts are fantastic for providing students with clear, simple and concise tutorials on how to use various online tools (such as library catalogues, advanced Google searching and subscription resources). I can definitely see myself creating a lot more of these in the near future!

* I should point out that because you can only record one screencast at a time, you can't record a "how to record a QuickTime screencast" screencast using QuickTime. I used a small, free app for Macs called QuickCast