ScreenFlow

Hands down this is my favorite way of making a podcast. The ease with which I can capture the video on my Macintosh computer is astounding. Their are tons of options for post-production manipulation. You can add audio, strip audio, mix clips, fade in camera grabs (i.e. images of me talking) with with the screen I'm working on in the background.  And the price is amazingly reasonable. It runs less than $100(Last time I checked) and they will be happy to give you a 10% educators discount. You just have to write to them.

The company to get this program from is Telestream.

I could gush for pages about how much I like this program. As I said, it is easy to use, and amazing control with the timelines.   But rather than me tell you about it, why don't you look at one of their excellent tutorials:

Reflector

Although PowerPoint has ways to annotate the screen, I personally find it cumbersome to draw with the mouse.  I could use a stylus with the bamboo pad  and sometimes there are other input options.

Nothing beats using an iPad: you can see right on the screen what you're doing. I prefer to use a stylus for my finger, but I don't have any specific set method.

But how to get that into a blog?  Sometimes I use the program ExplainEverything for the iPad by itself.  I can just upload that directly into YouTube.

If I want to intersperse PowerPoint presentations  with diagrams and other kinds of modeling, I can use Reflector.  This is not just a Mac program, but I have not had success with it using the PC, which is why I have it on the "Mac" page of the blog.  Reflector accepts video feeds from"AirPlay"(this is an iOS method of sending video and sound to other units, like the AppleTV).  You need to run the reflector program on the computer which is to receive the signals.  I have it running on my laptop. I can use ScreenFlow to capture the desktop image and when I want to show something on my iPad, I can just activate the reflector program.

Another amazing feature is that you can consolidate several video feeds. For example, you can get up to (I think) eight student iPhones/iPad on your screen during class time. I occasionally use this to challenge the students to demonstrate a concept.  I can keep some of the video feeds on a separate monitor and pull them up as interesting things develop.

If you typically use a Windows computer, you could try this program out. Like I said, I did not have luck with this.

You can purchase Reflector from AirSquirrels.

PointoFix

I love this for making quick screen grabs that I can mark up!  It's free but is written by a German group.  You have to load in an English translator, but it's simple to use, creates custom-sized swatches you can save or copy/paste.  If you get an error, the dialogue box may be in German, which is kind of fun.  It's available from http://www.pointofix.de/download.php.

Captivate

This software is amazingly easy to use and creates very professional looking final products.  It is quite expensive, and the output is rendered into shockwave (Flash) output. I believe you can also make movies and load them into YouTube. The advantage of using Flash output is that you can create interactivity very easily. You can create drag-and-drop exercises, multiple-choice questions, live links, and a host of other exercises.  It is available from Adobe Corporation.

CamStudio

This is a free software package that works very well.  You can download it from http://camstudio.org (they request a donation only - a very good deal).

I find it does a great job with sound recording and screen capture. It is a little bit clumsy to use, but just to get the main ideas onto the screen is pretty simple.  Essentially, I just record what I want to do on the computer and talk as I do it.  I take the finished file, and put it into YouTube. You can also create a shockwave (Flash) version, but these do not play on iOS devices (iPhone/iPad).