Vodcast Journal Entry

I worked in Youth Services for about 10 years. I loved doing story time, but it always made me sad I couldn't do story time for my friends' kids who live far away. However, with YouTube I could! So I recorded a couple of videos of me reading stories and shared them with friends. It was really just me holding up a book and reading it. I decided I wanted to do something similar, but take it to the next level.

I absolutely love Kid Sheriff and the Terrible Toads. I actually own the book. I had just used Active Presenter for the first time recently, and figured I could probably use it for this project. First, I took pictures of every single page of the book. Then I uploaded them and made each one into a slide. My original idea was to highlight the words on the pages while I read them. I actually figured out a way to make this work. I started working on that and then realized that for a lot of the pages with text, that's all that was on there - which is really boring to watch.

Since I wasn't sure about what to do with the words, I put that aside for a bit and focused on recording instead. I had recently used a podcast stand microphone my bf had for some reason, but when I hooked it up this time, it didn't work. The only microphone the computer would pick up was the built-in mic. With no other options, I decided to just go with it.

After I got done with the recording, I realized there was a closed captioning option. I had to go through deleting the extra slides and then adding all the captioning. There were still some slides that had a few sentences written out, so I decided not to do captions for those - since the words would already be on the screen.

There's a preview option with the software, but I still had to export the vodcast a couple of times because I kept finding things I missed. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the end product. There could be improvements, of course. Maybe I'll try them if I start doing this for my friends' kids again.