February 2006 Archives

Using Centra Reports (flash movie) has been added to the list of ever-growing resources at http://eit.tamu.edu/Centra.html

I usually set the number of concurrent speakers to more than 1- because I've moderated a session in which the leader's mike wasn't working, but they were pressing the Ctrl key (or had it locked) and not watching the screen which had raised hands and x's and I couldn't interrupt them. I always want someone to be able to interrupt me. But if there's overtalking, or someone has their mike set to voice activate and is coughing, then I take mikes away.

I've used Camtasia to play back a recording and capture the screen, then edited it. It would be great if we could pull the recording directly into camtasia (ie import it) and I've asked centra if there's a way to get the recording into another format and haven't gotten an answer. Once the recording is edited, though, you can upload it back into centra as the official recording, by using Manage Recordings. I'm looking to 'chop up' centras and put snippets into other types of eLearning, to give variety to what might be more of a page turner. Haven't had the time to dedicate to making it happen, though. By the way- camtasia doesn't have an auto save feature, so don't wait 2 hours to save or your computer could crash and you'd lose everything. True story :(

Centra events can be (should be!) categorized in folders & subfolders to make them easier to find. When creating a new event, don't put it in the main event folder... there's probably a subfolder that already exists that it can fit into, and if there isn't, create one!

I'm not sure exactly what the capabilities are, but there are some functions available in this version for editing recordings. Once an event is recorded, go into Manage Events, Manage Recordings and note the Edit link. That will open the recorded event and allow you to modify it- it appears that you can combine recordings, remove portions of a recording etc. Not quite as powerful as Camtasia, but it will save the edited recording as a Centra recording, which, proposedly, will retain the eval abilities of any recorded event.