Category: Microsoft

My last post covered the cognitive load of hybrid sessions on tutors but the reality is, that’s only half of it. When discussing the ins and outs of these sessions with colleagues, one recurring topic has been the difficulty of knowing what tool to use when – it’s great that there are a lot of options, but not so much when you spend most of your time trying to choose between them!

With this in mind, I set out to write a little something with my tips for screen recordings. I initially thought I’d do a summary of each platform but then it struck me that a lot of the time, I combine a couple of tools to get the result I want. So instead, I’ve gone for a different approach…focusing on what you might want to do with your screen recordings, and how you might go about doing it. I’m limiting my tips to the following platforms:

• • Panopto
  • Microsoft Stream
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Windows 10 Video Editor

So here’s my non-exhaustive list (click on the links below to jump ahead)…

1. 1. Record a full lecture
   2. Record a mini lecture
   3. Record a little snippet
   4. Edit a recording
   5. Share a recording

Record a full lecture

Nine times out of ten, my preferred option for this is Panopto. If you turn the webcam on, it records it as a different source stream – this means it’ll appear as a picture-in-picture in the embedded viewer, and as a separate item in the Panopto player. The latter option allows the speaker to be a bit more animated on screen, making it feel a little closer to an in-person session (or maybe I just like waving my arms about a lot). Another advantage is that you can set up a Table of Contents pretty easily.

The downside is that sometimes it all feels a bit overkill. If you record the PowerPoint presentation (as opposed to the screen), Panopto appears to generate an automatic Table of Contents that’s linked to the actual animations…which is a bit of a nuisance if you’ve got a lot of them. And if you want to switch from the screen to the iPad, creates multiple source streams…like I said, overkill.

One solution to this is to record the lecture as a Microsoft Teams meeting. You can start a meeting with yourself (less pathetic than it sounds, honest) and join the same meeting from your iPad (or alternative) – then all you have to do is share the appropriate screen when you need to. The meeting recording will be automatically uploaded to Microsoft Stream and then you can do the post-processing there (more details below).

Note that I wouldn’t use PowerPoint to record a lecture, for the reasons laid out in the Teesside LTE blog.

Record a mini lecture (< 15 mins)

So if your recording is less than 15 minutes, I’d recommend the Screen Recording feature in Microsoft Stream. The advantage is that unlike Panopto, you don’t need to download and install anything, and there’s a lot less faff (yes, technical term). A recent improvement to Stream is that you can create a Table of Contents in the description by just entering the time in the correct format – even easier than Panopto!

The limitations of Stream (other than the 15 min cut-off) are with regards to editing and sharing, but more on that later.

Record a little snippet

What if you want to just record a little video clip to be embedded on another platform? Well you could use the same methods I’ve described above, and then use one of the techniques I’ve listed below. However if you’re trying to embed the clip into a PowerPoint presentation, you can record directly in PowerPoint. Simply use the Screen Recording feature to select the area of the screen you want to record, and that’s it. PowerPoint will automatically load the clip onto the slide you were working on, and then you can proceed to edit it there – or you can save the clip as a media file and edit it elsewhere.

Edit a recording

OK so you’ve recorded your lecture/snippet and now you need to get rid of the part of the video where you sneezed, or where you switched between screens and showed off your Avengers Endgame wallpaper. What you do depends on the platform you used.

If you used Panopto, the inbuilt editor allows you to trim the ends or cut out portions at any point in the recording. It hides the cuts so if you change your mind later, you can just get restore them as required.

If your video is stored in Microsoft Stream, it’s a bit more complicated. You can trim the ends within Stream itself, but there’s currently no functionality to cut out sections of the video. If this is what needs to be done, then this is what I typically do:

1. 1. Trim the ends of the video within Stream
   2. Download the video (whenever I’ve tried to download without trimming, the file has been in a .webm format that I can’t do anything with; when I download after trimming, it downloads as .mp4 …go figure!)
   3. Open the Windows 10 Video Editor and load the .mp4 file as a new project
   4. Trim, split or cut as required

The Windows 10 Video Editor is great. It can be a bit sluggish at times, but a quick restart usually gets it back on track. The extra advantage that gives it an edge over Panopto is that you can change the speed of certain portions. Once you’ve perfected your video, you can export it as an .mp4 and then upload to Panopto or Stream (or wherever else you want to).

Share a recording

If you’re going to share your recording, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Panopto: By default, it’s accessible to anyone who has access to the Blackboard module in which it was created (module and year). If you want it to be accessible to the same module year in year out, you can move the recording into its parent folder. If you want it to share it beyond the module, you can change the permissions – you can even make it accessible to individuals outside the institution if you want.

Stream: When publishing the video, you can choose if you want the entire organisation to see the video. If you want it to be visible to specific people only, you can create a group and share with that group only; so for instance I’ve created a group for a particular module and I make sure to give that group access to all the relevant recordings – any student I’ve added to the group will be able to see those videos. If your video is a recording of a Teams meeting, anyone with access to that meeting (confirmed attendees, Team members) will be able to see the video.

It’s important to note that whilst you can embed a Panopto video in Blackboard, you can’t embed it anywhere else. And whilst you can embed a Stream video anywhere (including OneNote, which is really useful), it can’t be seen by anyone outside the organisation. So if you have external guests in a Team, they won’t be able to see the meeting recordings by default (you can, however, download the video files from Stream and upload them to the Team).

So that’s it…my tips for recording sessions. I’m sure there are better ways of doing all these things, and other software (e.g. Camtasia, OBS) that have much more functionality…but what I’ve described above works for me, and I hope you find my tips useful.

I haven’t been listening to much music lately because I’ve been more than a little stressed (or maybe it’s the other way around?) but yesterday marked 9 whole years since I started working at Teesside, so let’s end with a bit of celebration, and a performance that always makes me happy.