Widgets, screenshots and screencasting

This week I decided to take a detour on my way through the 'extra things'  to look at a couple of the regular 'things' that I was unfamiliar with.

LightShot
I was interested in trying LightShot - unfortunately although I appeared to be making progress  (I got as far as the feather icon appearing in my Firefox toolbar),

Only a feather!

...and an error

all attempts to use it resulted in an error message.

Screencast-o-matic

I had more luck with screencasting. I was very impressed with screen-o-matic - it was easy to use - and the results looked very professional (not sure about my content though!). I created a short instructional 'video' on how to use library search. I liked the way it was possible to create a useable guide without having to add a soundtrack.

Unfortunately I failed to manage to get it to upload  to YouTube - so you will be spared having to watch my first attempts :)



Library Widget

I have used the Cambridge Libraries Widget before - however this was an opportunity to add it to my iGoogle page and set up an RSS feed. As promised in the Cam 23 2.0 blog, this was very easy. I like the idea of having it in a location that I use daily rather than having to go to a specific webpage. The ability to set up a loans feed is a clever idea, an inspired use of RSS feeds.


Good as the widget and the RSS feed are - for me the winner has to be the ability to set up a feed to my Google calender. I was impressed how quick it was to do - now I will have no excuse for not returning my books on time (especially as my Google Calendar is synched with my phone!). Maybe if we can persuade our students to set this up, we should have less people returning books late because they didn't see the e-mail reminder... perhaps!