Thing 5: Video Presentations

I'd describe the making of my first Screencast-O-Matic Video as irritating and annoying.

If you've read my first blog post, you know that I have a number of musculoskeletal problems. I use some assistive equipment at work, including a small touchpad mouse. This doesn't make for long, smooth sweeps from one part of a screen to another...which appears to be an unstated best practice for Screencast-O-Matic videos. For me, preparing a higher quality video with this software would also mean finding a different workstation--one with a conventional mouse I can use (briefly!) to maneuver in a larger expanse on a table or desktop.

Here's my final product, which I created on a laptop that has a larger touchpad. It's rough around the edges, but I reached the point at which striving for improvements wasn't worth the investment of time and energy. I opted to omit a soundtrack, as that would require spending a bit more time on transcripts and captions.

[Video (3:38). Title screen: NUR 101 Library Presentation--A Quick Recap (Visuals only). Demonstrates a search of the CINAHL database, starting from the Fogler Library homepage. The presenter clicks on the Databases button and uses an alphabetical index to view part of a long list of library databases. She selects CINAHL with Full Text and clicks CINAHL Headings in the database menu bar. She searches for nurses, finds it as a CINAHL heading, and clicks on the term to display the tree of more specific terms under Nurses. She clicks the term Nurses by Role to reveal more details of the tree, scrolls down and selects Nurse Liaison, then clicks Search Database. She clicks Advanced Search under the search boxes to reach options for limiting the results. She selects 3 checkboxes: English Language, Peer Reviewed, and Research Article. Scrolling down, she selects Nursing from the Journal Subset menu, and All Child from the Age Groups menu. These limits dramatically reduce the number of search results. Some search results link directly to full text. For another, she clicks the Article Linker button under the result, and selects University of Maine as her location. After a moment, Article Linker returns a screen linking to the full text.]

Powtoon looks intriguing (and far less reliant on smooth mouse sweeps), but there's another Thing waiting in the wings.