I've been using various screen-casting apps for teaching since the early 2000's and my students love being able to download and review lectures & seminars at their convenience. I started out using an application called "ProfCast" on my laptop, and for the past decade or so I've been using Doceri, which consists of two apps, one running on the laptop and one running on my iPad.
The way this works is that I set up my laptop at the front of the room, with an HDMI output feeding the projector (the laptop's primary display is showing my teaching notes, Keynote presenter display or something else), I start the Doceri desktop software, which puts up a QR code on the laptop display, I start Doceri on the iPad and point the iPad's camera at the QR code, which automates the network connection between the laptop and the iPad. At this point Doceri on the iPad allows me to select which of the laptops displays to record. I click the record button, and recording will consist of audio from the iPad's microphone and whatever is displayed on the projector. One of the killer features is that Doceri provides markup tools, so I can use the iPad's stylus to draw or write overtop of whatever is being displayed by the laptop, or dropdown a whiteboard and draw/write on that, and everything I draw appears on the projected display and in the screencast. Also, because I'm presenting from the iPad which is wirelessly connected to the laptop, I'm free to move around in the class (I frequently pass the iPad to students and get them to draw/write on the material being presented as part of in-class discussions/flipped classroom problem solving, etc.). And importantly, I'm not locked into using PowerPoint or Keynote or any specific presentation software; I frequently have PDFs, movies/animations, software simulations, web pages, microscopy image processing software, sequence data, or other software running on the laptop; Doceri allows me to annotate over and screencast anything I can display from the laptop. One other clever thing it does is that the resulting quicktime movie is usually pretty small (~50 MB for a 1.5 hour recording) because it's only recording image data when the image on the screen changes. So as long as I'm not showing video, the screencast doesn't get huge.
Much to my dismay, Doceri has been discontinued and I can't find any similar products or alternative solutions to achieve the same objectives. SP Controls was the company that developed Doceri, and I have been in touch with them about this; their business is primarily hardware and apparently they found Doceri was competing with hardware solutions they were making more money from, so they've discontinued it.
So I'm hoping to interest someone here in working with me to develop a replacement. I haven't done any coding since the 1980's, and my schedule is much too full to allow me to learn enough to do this myself. I guess I could try to hack something together with ChatGPT, but it would be rubbish and I'm hoping to develop a tool that teachers and others who do this sort of presentation work may want to buy and use.
But I'm afraid all I'd be able to bring to this collaboration would be the design ideas, testing and the promise to market the product once it's working well enough to be useful; I'd start by writing a paper to be published in one of the peer reviewed educational journals on the value of this type of teaching tool, and by demoing it at a few conferences. I don't think this sort of thing would ever may anyone rich, but I do think it would sell well enough to be worth the effort.
I'd love to hear what anyone thinks about this; are there any other products that already do this that I may not have found?
The way this works is that I set up my laptop at the front of the room, with an HDMI output feeding the projector (the laptop's primary display is showing my teaching notes, Keynote presenter display or something else), I start the Doceri desktop software, which puts up a QR code on the laptop display, I start Doceri on the iPad and point the iPad's camera at the QR code, which automates the network connection between the laptop and the iPad. At this point Doceri on the iPad allows me to select which of the laptops displays to record. I click the record button, and recording will consist of audio from the iPad's microphone and whatever is displayed on the projector. One of the killer features is that Doceri provides markup tools, so I can use the iPad's stylus to draw or write overtop of whatever is being displayed by the laptop, or dropdown a whiteboard and draw/write on that, and everything I draw appears on the projected display and in the screencast. Also, because I'm presenting from the iPad which is wirelessly connected to the laptop, I'm free to move around in the class (I frequently pass the iPad to students and get them to draw/write on the material being presented as part of in-class discussions/flipped classroom problem solving, etc.). And importantly, I'm not locked into using PowerPoint or Keynote or any specific presentation software; I frequently have PDFs, movies/animations, software simulations, web pages, microscopy image processing software, sequence data, or other software running on the laptop; Doceri allows me to annotate over and screencast anything I can display from the laptop. One other clever thing it does is that the resulting quicktime movie is usually pretty small (~50 MB for a 1.5 hour recording) because it's only recording image data when the image on the screen changes. So as long as I'm not showing video, the screencast doesn't get huge.
Much to my dismay, Doceri has been discontinued and I can't find any similar products or alternative solutions to achieve the same objectives. SP Controls was the company that developed Doceri, and I have been in touch with them about this; their business is primarily hardware and apparently they found Doceri was competing with hardware solutions they were making more money from, so they've discontinued it.
So I'm hoping to interest someone here in working with me to develop a replacement. I haven't done any coding since the 1980's, and my schedule is much too full to allow me to learn enough to do this myself. I guess I could try to hack something together with ChatGPT, but it would be rubbish and I'm hoping to develop a tool that teachers and others who do this sort of presentation work may want to buy and use.
But I'm afraid all I'd be able to bring to this collaboration would be the design ideas, testing and the promise to market the product once it's working well enough to be useful; I'd start by writing a paper to be published in one of the peer reviewed educational journals on the value of this type of teaching tool, and by demoing it at a few conferences. I don't think this sort of thing would ever may anyone rich, but I do think it would sell well enough to be worth the effort.
I'd love to hear what anyone thinks about this; are there any other products that already do this that I may not have found?
