{"id":3708,"date":"2016-05-26T09:09:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T08:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3708"},"modified":"2016-05-27T07:46:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T06:46:35","slug":"what-software-did-we-use-for-our-online-presentations-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/what-software-did-we-use-for-our-online-presentations-training\/","title":{"rendered":"What software did we use for our online presentations training?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3695\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/course_working_on_it_for_blog-300x169.png\" alt=\"course_working_on_it_for_blog\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" \/>Fun question, this. Let&#8217;s get the question of delivery out of the way first: we&#8217;re using <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkific.com\">thinkific.com<\/a>. The pic here is a screencapture of what that looks like in development.<\/p>\n<p>However, with no offence to the team at thinkific &#8211; who have been great! &#8211; where you host it is the least of your worries. This blog post is about how we created it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Video<\/strong>. Easy-peasy. We&#8217;re on Macs, so <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/uk\/mac\/imovie\/\">iMovie<\/a> did the business. It&#8217;s not the best on the market but it&#8217;s exceptionally good for what it is. Most of the people who complain about it seem to me to have either<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>decided to complain that it&#8217;s something it never tried to be<\/li>\n<li>never spent time learning how to use it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could be wrong! :)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Audio<\/strong>. Almost as easy. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/uk\/mac\/garageband\/\">Garageband<\/a> is great, but since Apple decided to remove podcasting functions it&#8217;s a tiny bit less great. Welcome back to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.audacityteam.org\/\">Audacity<\/a>. Really, I can&#8217;t imagine why anyone tries to do any audio work with out it. It&#8217;s powerful, it&#8217;s easy and it&#8217;s free. Oh, and it works on all operating systems. What&#8217;s not to love. Seriously!<\/p>\n<p>An absolute no-brainer. Just occasionally we recorded in Audacity and then did the fancy tweaking Garagband, just for fun.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Fancy video<\/strong>. I&#8217;m a bit of a fan of canuck <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dottotech.com\/\">Steve Dotto<\/a>\u00a0and his training. If you don&#8217;t know him, do a quick search and watch his work. The screen-in-screen stuff is great to watch as you see him as he does his thing &#8211; it&#8217;s not just a voice-over of the screen. He does this using <a href=\"https:\/\/www.telestream.net\/screenflow\/\">screenflow<\/a>. \u00a0The principle is simple &#8211; you can record both your screen and yourself at the same time, so it&#8217;s particularly suited for doing a running commentary of what&#8217;s on your screen, and seeing someone&#8217;s face is so much more engaging than just watching their screen.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an absolute no-brainer of a piece of software. The only hard part was finding a shade of green material that worked as green-screen so we can edit out the background of the office!<\/p>\n<p>By the way, to save you time, it uploads by magic to <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\">vimeo<\/a>, which is where our videos are stored. From memory, it&#8217;s only about \u00a380 &#8211; but there&#8217;s quite a steep learning curve, despite all the fantastic training\/support: once you&#8217;ve got the the hang of it, though, you&#8217;re good to go!<\/p>\n<p>Mac only, this one&#8230; sorry you Windows folks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Movies<\/strong>. We did these a few ways. Both Keynote and quickbooks allow you to record your voice over the visuals. \u00a0A quick export to .mov file format and you&#8217;re good to go. PowerPoint allows you to do the same in Windows, of course.<\/p>\n<p>Timesaving tip &#8211; automatically upload to vimeo without spending time rendering\/exporting first.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Video and audio hosting<\/strong>. That vimeo and soundcloud, respectively. We decided on vimeo (and not a free option) because it&#8217;s got better functionality and control that YouTube &#8211; and it&#8217;s just all round &#8220;cleaner&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Why didn&#8217;t we host our videos and things with the rest of our site? \u00a0Well in the first instance it was because our original hosts the cute-but-damaged FreshMember \u00a0charged extra for hosting. It turned out to be a good thing, in the end, as when we migrated from cute-but-damaged Freshmember there was less fuss as the big files were stored somewhere else &#8211; the training simply embeds them, elegantly.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>And that&#8217;s it? Yes. Obviously there were dozens of programs we used &#8216;in passing&#8217; to do things like screen grabs or draft documents (grab and pages, exporting to PDF) but there&#8217;s nothing particularly special about these so I&#8217;ve not bothered mentioning them.<\/p>\n<p>Have fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fun question, this. Let&#8217;s get the question of delivery out of the way first: we&#8217;re using thinkific.com. The pic here is a screencapture of what that looks like in development. However, with no offence to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-online-training","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3708"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3715,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions\/3715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}