This was an interesting process for me. I did a first draft with Jing and it was horrible — though it did give me practice. I talked with one of our Academic ITS people and he turned me onto Chrome Screencastify. This version is my second go with that product. To my thinking this is adequate, but, I think better is possible, though perhaps not with free products. Oddly enough publishing it was interestingly challenging. Ostensibly you can simply upload to YouTube, alas, that didn’t work for me. In the end WordPress came through and even though this installation isn’t “live” (soon it will be my e-portfolio, but for now it is in development) you should be able to view the screen cast. I think I can get away with my use of the segment under Fair Use, alas, while Pharrell probably wouldn’t be a chump about it, NBC might. So I am casting about for other examples for avoiding weaknesses and focusing on strengths.
Hi Bob,
I’m glad you did this. I wouldn’t have ever thought of doing a web tour, but it was a great idea. There were no distractions and it was very natural sounding like you were just sitting next to another person and walking around the gallup site. My favorite part was at the very end when you said, ‘you know your strengths are, we are doing this so we can discover them’. I think that was a really powerful concept to bring out and a great note to end on. I would love to side chat some time about how much time you are able to spend on strengths training for your team and find out what activities are working for you. How much individual work do you get in before you jump into the team stuff? Stuff like that:)
Kim, I’m certainly willing to talk about this further. I will say that our program to create a library wide student employee career path was interrupted and broken. I have a project for this Spring and Summer to redo that work. While I am optimistic about this new opportunity I am also frustrated that we are doing this work anew again, rather than being further along. So, I am just now introducing the emphasis on strengths to our entire staff, not just, student employees. I think an important value it introduces is looking at the good in our co-workers rather then their weaknesses. It is a timely roll-out as it fits well with our new President’s values.
Hi Bob, I found the content of your screencast very interesting. We do not always think about our strengths (and if you are like me you think more of weaknesses because they are more noticeable, I think). What I also liked about your screencast is that you have shared found resources simultaneously with delivering course content and sharing your own experience like with taking StrengthTests. It really put things in perspective for me and eased a fear that I might potentially fail these tests (if that makes sense).
The background noise was distracting though ? If you are looking for a good screencasting free piece of software I highly recommend http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/. There is a web-based version and an app you can download to your computer. It gives you some editing capabilities (even with free account) connects directly to your YouTube account, allows you to download your video on your computer in mp4 format, which you can also bring into video-editing software where you can clean up extraneous noise a little. I swear by it.
Tatiana, thanks for the recommendation. I was annoyed with both Jing and Screencastify because they produce files that are not editable. I’ll look at Screencast-o-matic.
When we first started strengths our department of 3 staff and 2 student employees all did it. I think it helped the student employees to have all of using the same language. I know it helped me as a supervisor get to know what motivates each member of my time. I was not able to edit using keynote and quicktime. I was glad it was a short assignment because I just had to keep starting over.
Lots of good stuff here, Bob. Nice job on the web tour and I agree with Kim and Tatiana’s comments about the presentation and the content.
I thought your screen cast was great and I liked how you led us through your thinking and some of the results. You had a reflective quality, which is often hard to project. As soon as we turn on the record button, it often becomes hard to continue to think…we tend to switch over into narration mode.
Too bad the audio on the clip was a bit weak. I’m wearing headphones and I struggled to hear the first portion until you turned it up. (But I’m sure you’re aware of that)…
How long does it take to assess one’s strengths? Is it an arduous survey that then reveals some sort of strength scores based on how you respond to various questions? Or is it more self-assessment based? Curious.
On the subject of various screencasting solutions… I’d throw out another vote for Quicktime. I know the updated mac client allows for easy screen video capture, and I believe the PC one does as well. And it is free. I’ve had some luck with screen-cast-o-matic as well… but it can be a bit twitchy with java requirements and so on. Lastly, my new favorite is ScreenFlow. If you do much video editing, the screen capture tool within screen flow is a wonderful professional level tool also.
On the windows side of the room, there’s http://www.screenpresso.com also… seems like they’re putting some effort into this as well.
-owen