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brought to you by the BMB Teaching Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
We now routinely give presentations in front of a live audience while capturing them with Camtasia for later screencasts. One problem that arises is that the cursor used for inking is a tiny dot, invisible to the audience. Switching between the usual arrow and the pen is tedious and wastes time. On the other hand, you don't want to use a laser pointer to direct your audience's focus because these cues won't be visible in the screencast.
This video shows a workaround that has the additional benefit of providing two types of ink, permanent (with the option to save it) and transient. The transient ink can be used to underlie the current focal concept in a slide, or to doodle on the margin while responding to questions. The permanent ink would be used for the ink showing material conscienceously omitted from the prepared slide for development in class (calculations, electron pushing in chemical reactions, answers to questions posed to the audience). Using the eraser, the permanent ink may be erased stroke by stroke if desired, In contrast, a single button will erase the transient ink, clearing up the slide to switch to the next idea, and transient ink will not appear on saved slides.
How is this achieved? You set up your tablet so that pressing the "Tablet shortcut button" simulates pressing a key combination, say Ctrl-Shift-D. Then, you set up Camtasia to switch into its ScreenDraw mode when entering that key combination. Having done that, you can press the "Table shortcut button" any time while recording, causing the cursor to change to a pencil shape and allowing you to ink anywhere on the screen. Pressing the escape key or button will cancel ScreenDraw, remove the annotations and return controll to the programs that were running.
To use the two types of inking in Powerpoint, you start your presentation and the Camtasia recorder. Switch to the powerpoint pen and use this for permanent annotations (you can advance slides with the navigation button or by using the command buttons on the bottom left part of your screen. If you need a more visible cursor, press the "Tablet shortcut button", and the pencil-shaped cursor will appear. You can transiently annotate items, getting as messy and busy as needed. To erase the transient ink, press the escape button (if you inadvertantly press it twice, you will leave the inking mode in powerpoint, if you press it a third time, you will leave the presentation alltogether, so proceed with caution).
The result of this maneuver is shown in the above screen cast. Camtasia enlarges the powerpoint pen cursor, so the problem we want to work around is less apparent in the video than it is in a live presentation.