Friday, 1 February 2008

SnapzPro

Alexandra needs the SL sessions recorded for her research. Since I use a Mac, neither Screencorder nor Camtasia are viable options, since they're PC programs (though I do have Parallels on this Mac, I hardly ever use it - why would you want to?!).

We've found a promising-looking program called SnapzProX. Our IT-technician/pedagogue, Peter Carlsson (who's also a student on the course) has downloaded it and it seems to work. I hope to get it installed some time at the beginning of next week, so we'll see how it goes. I can envisage, though, that I'm going to have to be fast on my feet during lessons, since these recordings result in very large data files. I'll probably try to remember to record, say, about 10 minutes at a time (which is about the length of the 'teacher talking time' during each segment of my lessons). Must remember to include a reminder about this in my detailed lesson planning.

I've got a top-of-the-range iMac with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (OK, I admit, I'm copying from the screen!) and memory that's called 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRam (if that means anything to you!). It's also got 256 MB of VRAM. I don't understand all this, but I liaised with Bryan (who does) when we were ordering this machine, so that I'd get the best machine I could for use with SL. One of the interesting lessons I'm expecting to learn is what happens when the different machines different students use start interacting with each other.

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