Flipping the whiteboard?

Please note – Office Mix is being discontinued by Microsoft – there are other options available.

You might have seen the recent post about capturing whiteboard activity from live teaching sessions using smartmarkers and panopto.  But what about if you want to produce whiteboard style content to be viewed before a teaching session, or as a separate resource that won’t be delivered in a live session.  Whiteboard / blackboard style “explainer” videos are popular online as ways of demonstrating and explaining concepts in a visual way without the need to build complex animations to explain things.  For example: Algebra – Khan Academy.  These sort of videos are easy to create if you are used to using a whiteboard and can be created using software that is freely available within the university.

Here’s an example I made to demonstrate some of the things you can do using one-note and the full screen drawing area.  My handwriting and drawing is average, which shows a bit in the video, but if you are used to using a whiteboard this shouldn’t be the case.

I hope this gives some idea of what you could do and some of the additional features too.  You can find some more information below about how to get started, or you can contact us CEILT@cardiff.ac.uk for a further demo / trial.

What do I need?

Hardware

• Touch input computer device such as:
  • A computer / laptop and a graphics / drawing tablet.  This is a USB device that comes with a writing surface and a pen which acts like a mouse allowing you to draw with the cursor. Like this
  • A touch screen computer with a pen, such as the Microsoft surface.
• A microphone / webcam for capturing audio

Software

• Drawing software (I’m using onenote full screen drawing in windows 10)
• Screen capture software (I’m using power point with office mix installed)
• Video distribution software (I’m using panopto)

How do I do it?

• Install office mix for powerpoint (please note, this is not supported by the university but I have found it to be useful.  You can use panopto with personal capture if you want a supported screen capture solution)
• Open one note in full screen drawing mode (this works on windows 10 only.  There are other drawing apps available for other systems and you can use office mix directly for this too)
• Start office mix screen recorder
• Start writing / drawing and talking
• Stop the screen recorder when finished
• Export the video
• Upload it to panopto to make any edits

What about other software / hardware?

Whilst looking into this, I came across a lot of different free & paid solutions for this sort of thing.  Please get in touch with CEILT@cardiff.ac.uk and we can see what would be the most appropriate.

What should I do if I want to try this?

If you’d like some guidance or help getting started or trying out a graphics tablet / touch screen computer please get in touch with CEILT@cardiff.ac.uk and we can arrange a demo / trial