With my recent switch to the Mac platform came excitement, a sense of discovery and the challenge of finding new software solutions to cater for my daily work flow. For the most part it was fairly easy to discover equivalent or indeed better ways of doing things but in some cases I actually discovered completely new tools to aid in the development of learning materials. One such tool is ProfCast – a versatile, powerful, yet very simple to use tool for recording lectures including PowerPoint and/or Keynote slides for creating enhanced podcasts. ProfCast provides a low cost solution for recording and distributing lectures, special events, and presentations as podcasts. ProfCast offers an integrated work flow that makes creating, recording, and publishing podcasts easy. It’s as simple as Launch, Load, and Lecture!
ProfCast creates ‘enhanced media files’ in the .m4a, .m4b, .m4v or .mov formats. These are audio files which contain chapter markers where you can include titles, images and web links. The images in these files can be viewed on an iPod with photo capabilities or video capabilities, through iTunes or even in QuickTime. The file extension m4b can be used so that the resulting AAC file will be “bookmarkable” and have chapter markers on non-clickwheel ipods as well (though chapter names and images will be missing) because that is the filename used for audiobooks, however clickwheel iPods with the new firmware installed treat m4a files the same as m4b files, so m4a files on those iPods will be bookmarkable and have chapters/chapter art/chapter links.
The integrated Podcast Manager will generate and publish RSS files (needed to create a podcast). You can add any media (even files not recorded with ProfCast) to your podcast by simply dragging the file onto the episode selector well (this will create a new episode for the media file) From the podcast manager you can publish to various servers including FTP, SFTP, MobileMe WebDAV or even a local folder. ProfCast also allows you to send your recorded presentation to GarageBand (version 3 or higher) for further editing. The Send to GarageBand option will export the raw materials (the recordings, the slides and the synchronization) for editing within Garage Band. You can edit all aspects of your podcast within GarageBand. When you have finished, you can use GarageBand to export your podcast episode to iWeb or save it as a file.
ProfCast gives you the ability to easily take a snap shot of a non-presentation images (Full Screen, Window or a Selection that you choose) and integrate it with your enhanced podcast! The new Screenshot utility can be called with an f-key that you configure and allows you to capture stationary screen shots of your demonstration, or a web page that you visit during your presentation. Use ⌘-tab to leave your presentation for demonstrations as opposed to the escape key. Already several of my students have commented on the video podcasts of lectures that I have made available, the new chapters thumbnail option in QuickTime X allows students to access the material they need quickly and effectively, this can also be done in a slightly less impressive manner via older version of QuickTime.
ProfCast is a revolutionary e-learning development tool that is now cemented into my development work flow, it makes lectures my lectures available to all my students at whatever time suits them and provides a rich multimedia centric approach to learning. It comes highly recommended.
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