Sue Waters

IT’S Sunday–apparently another day of rest I thought! But No! And to make matters worse I felt that my computer had taken the day off!

CogDog (Alan Levine) was nice enough to reply to yesterday’s road test of online video creators post that “There is a blurry line between the video editing tools and the ones that allow audio narrated slideshows, which are, to me, actually a bit easier to create (no video camera needed) and to edit. I just played with myPlick which was about the easiest of ones I have tried for doing the synchronizing of sound to visual.“

So early this morning I went and checked out CogDog’s MyPlick Domino story. Definitely MyPlick fitted my original criteria for an online video creator in that it must make make the creation quicker or easier than using software on a PC or Mac.

MyPlick is similar to SlideCast in that it syncs audio with slides. While many people have been engaged by SlideCast, I haven’t, because you can’t host your audio at SlideShare and you have to host it on another site. I am looking for a faster way of creating my online videos – and putting Slides onto one site and audio onto another does not make sense. MyPlick lets you host both your audio and your slides at MyPlick!

Unfortunately, unlike CogDog, I had issues with uploading both my audio and slides to MyPlick. But never fear, MyPlick has fantastic support — prompt response by Lei Jin who uploaded my PowerPoint and audio to my account for me.

Being a Sunday I assumed that I would not hear from MyPlick until at least tomorrow so I decided, since obviously I had nothing better to do, I would create a SlideCast.

Sorry SlideShare — this is where you have made it hard. Would be helpful if you gave some advice on free hosting sites that work in your help notes. Tried hosting from my Podomatic account (which I knew would not work!). Then tried Odeo — must have been tired because I could not even work out how to upload the audio at Odeo! Finally went to my Internet Archive account that I knew would work but is not the most user friendly site. My first link from Internet Archive chipmunked — luckily the second worked fine. Here is the SlideCast I created and here are my notes on how to link your audio to a SlideCast!

While I was creating my SlideCast Lei uploaded the audio and PowerPoint. So after finishing my SlideCast I went to my MyPlick account and quickly synced my audio with my PowerPoint.

CogDog is definitely correct — MyPlick is definitely one of the fast and easiest way of synchronizing of sound to visual (much faster than creating a video podcast using MovieMaker from PowerPoints saved as .jpeg or using SlideCast).

Here is the MyPlick I created!

Lei Jin also gets the award for providing dedicated customer service because Edublogs can be picky about what embed code you use (please note it is not Edublogs but WordPress restrictions that is the issue). So poor Lei had to create the URL that would work for the Embed flash.

FINAL THOUGHT

Some interesting statistics. Before I created my SlideCast or MyPlick of Tips for podcasting I also create a video podcast of it which I put onto my podcast site.

The SlideCast has been made SlideCast of the day and has had far more views than my video podcast on my podcast site.

So maybe I was wrong about not originally including SlideCast as an online video creator.

And maybe CogDog is right? Anyone remember podcasting?