On Tuesday, Feb. 21 we had our first use of ProfCast. It was a great success. Amy Jo Stavnezer agreed to test the application during her Faculty at Large address. I was there a little ahead of time to hook the laptop up and make sure Amy Jo got started OK. There were no issues at all.

ProfCast allows one to capture the slides (it supports Keynote and PowerPoint) and audio of a presentation and keeps them in sync. To use the application requires OS X 10.4 and either presentation application. The only difference for the presenter is to start their presentation and then start ProfCast. When they are ready to present they press the Record button on ProfCast and the presentation starts and progresses like normal. At the end of the presentation ProfCast comes up and asks you to Publish the presentation as a Podcast. We canceled that and saved the session as an enhanced Podcast. This created an m4b file which was uploaded to the server.

If you view the video, you’ll notice the default size is a little small. Visitors can download the file and open it in QuickTime Player and choose to view it at Double size for a clearer picture. It is a little unclear as to what purpose we might use ProfCast in the classroom, but we will probably experiment with it for the remaining Faculty at Large events.

[display_podcast]