As we have moved to echo360 in the cloud… the new place to find your personal capture software is now also in the cloud.
From the main page that you first see when you login – go here:
or go directly to this link:
Don’t forget to still let us know that you are using the software by filling out this form.
Say you are an instructor. You want to use Blackboard and echo360 active learning or capture platform. You have TA’s or Course Builders in Blackboard.
So, you set up a schedule of captures through your support people for your course. You do want to publish these captures to Blackboard, so you also create this link (or maybe the support people do it for you.) Now you and your students can click on the link in Blackboard ( for us it is a video link in the Content Area of Blackboard course…) and see all the captures. The instructor also sees a dashboard of interesting analytics and has increased possible functionality.
But here is the crappy part: TA’s and Course Builders get Instructor roles in echo360.org.
So – that neat feature where Instructors would actually have a button in their account that allows them to add an ad hoc capture on their own? That has to be turned off. When you use this feature one can book a recording in any room that has an echo appliance… not just the one that you class actually occurs in. Can’t have students just recording content from any place they want. Sometimes grand rounds even happen in these rooms.. whoops HIPAA violation!
I like to allow Instructors to delete their own content. Nope. Turn that off.
Let instructors make copies of their content? Nope.
Well… maybe the primary instructor for a course could just go in a demote students that have instructor roles in echo360 back to students? Nope, instructors can only add more instructors. (I actually tried this as an admin… and yes, I can demote an instructor – theoretically to student. Only when you actually do this, it doesn’t make them a student at all… it removes them entirely. Don’t worry though, as soon as that TA goes back into Blackboard again and clicks through to echo360, they will be back in the course again — AS AN INSTRUCTOR.)
You have a few options for this. You can reserve a room that has SBCapture built in, and let us know the schedule so I can setup the recording. You need to use a mic when recording, so talk to the AV desk if you are unsure about that part.
You can record your lecture with a camera (or ipad/iphone), and get me the recording afterwards and I can publish it to your course. I have some courses that drop off camcorders and others that share files with me via Google Drive. I even have one instructor that sends me the recordings created when using Doceri.
You can use personal capture at home or in the office to record them at your leisure and send the recordings to blackboard afterwards for all of your students to watch. Personal Capture records everything showing on your screen, video from your webcam and audio from a mic. Tell us about your recordings so that we can hook in the publishing options.
Coming Soon: One Button Studio. A physical location, where students and instructors can go and with the push of a single button start recording in a well equipped mini studio.
Personal Capture request form:
Schedule single SBCapture recording:
Video Drop Off form:
I don’t want to write about this one service too much, but we just had another snow day and some instructors have thought to do this, but I’m sure more could do this and it just hasn’t occurred to them. SBCapture has been on campus now since 2008. Some of you that use it, have captured lectures in the past. Even for the very same lectures you are giving now, or would have given if school hadn’t gotten cancelled.
Yes – you can republish your old lectures into your current class.
Find the lecture that you are interested in, select edit, scroll down to the bottom and select “edit media”, then the “Save New” tab. From here you can give it a new name and description, then pick the current term, course and section and “Save as New”. The old lecture will appear in your current echocenter.
Discusses standards of video creation, expectations of instructional support staff, etc.
Are you over the snow? It’s been a white winter, that’s for sure!
More importantly are you teaching a course where you really need all of those pesky lecture hours? Do you know what online courses do when it snows really bad? They keep going. We have the technology so that you can keep going to! I’m going to share a trick with you that will let you “flip” those snow days. (Flipping is when you listen to the lecture at home, and do active learning/group work/homework in the classroom.)
Do you have a SBCapture account? Yes? Go here: https://echoserver.sinc.stonybrook.edu
Now go to the Downloads tab, and grab personal capture for the OS that you prefer. (Your choices are Win and OSX – don’t go getting all RaspPi on me!)
This software allows you to capture the video from your screen, audio from your mic and optionally, the video from a webcam. This way you can sit in front of your computer and give your lecture. There are simple edit capabilities, you can pause the recording in the middle and directly load the finished product straight into Blackboard.
Unless you are already using SBCapture for room based capture this semester, you will need to drop me a line so that I can make the appropriate hooks on the backend between SBCapture and Blackboard, but that is simple enough. Same goes for if you don’t already have an SBCapture account – just let me know, and I’ll set everything up.
FORM to request Personal Capture
Here is an example of what an end result looks like using Personal Capture:
(In this case the webcam was setup to the side… yours might be a tight shot of your face.)
I hope that you find this, and find it helpful!