Lulu eLibrarian

This cozy mystery set in the 1920′s was free with Kindle Unlimited so I gave it at try.  It turned out to be a quick, fun read with likable characters in a bucolic setting -- just what I needed in these difficult times.  

I’ve been building an awful lot of online training lately.  Since our buildings are closed, our users are turning to eResources more than ever and that means that we need tutorials and other help -- not just for the public, but for staff as well.  I’ve been experimenting with making my content more professional looking using a few neat tools:

Articulate 360

This is an online course creation software that I love.  You can create web courses using the Rise component, and you can also do really powerful interactive courses using some of their downloadable software including that old favorite, Storyline.  I mostly use Rise because I’m building courses quickly and I tend to get caught in the weeds in Storyline.  There are so many neat things you can do, that I get a little too fancy for what I really need.  Articulate is relatively expensive, so isn’t really something that most individuals will subscribe to.  They have institutional pricing that is pretty reasonable.

Articulate comes with Peek, a screen-recording tool, and Replay, a very simple video editing tool.  I use them together to create demo videos.  Sometimes I use my voice, and sometimes I just do titles.

If you’re a Mac user Articulate can be difficult because all of the downloadable software except Peek is Windows only.  I have a Windows partition on my Mac for that purpose, but it’s really irritating to deal with.  It’s easier to use my Windows machine at work.

Microsoft PowerPoint

If you don’t have screen-recording software, you can do decent screen recordings in PowerPoint in Windows.  Just open a blank presentation, go to the Insert tab, and click on the Screen-recording button.  This doesn’t seem to work in Mac.  

YouTube Studio

YouTube is a great resource for publishing embeddable (is that a word?) videos and for getting captions for voice recordings.   I love how it takes care of the timing and all you need to do is clean up the text.  Captioning my videos would be onerous without it! 

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