The most recent assignment we completed for our English 510 class was a multimedia tutorial. Our task was to select an online language-learning tool, investigate its features, and create a narrated tutorial that briefly describes the tool and how it can be used in a language learning context.

I chose Quizlet for my tutorial. While I was familiar with the concept of digital flashcards, I had never used them before. So I was glad to have the chance to get familiar with Quizlet and think about how I might use it myself.

Here’s how my tutorial ended up:

I created my tutorial using Camtasia. This was my first time using Camtasia, and I was impressed with it overall. I found it easy to learn and feature rich. When I’ve needed to create screencasts before, I’ve used QuickTime. QuickTime has the bare minimum in terms of capability, so it’s incredibly easy to use, but it doesn’t offer a lot of tools to help in postproduction. Not so with Camtasia. It was fun to play with different zooms, transitions, and call-outs as I edited my screencast footage, and I think it definitely made the final product seem more polished and user-friendly. Doing all that postproduction was time consuming, though, so I imagine if I were in a situation where I had to, say, provide video feedback for all students in a writing class, I’d likely stick with QuickTime and not worry about doing any postproduction.

As of now, my video has five whole views! It’s likely that all of those views are mine and Jim’s, but hopefully a few more people might stumble on it and find something in it that’s useful.