For the past few weeks, I have been creating video tutorials to help the faculty and students figure out how to utilize LiveText, the system I was hired to administrate. I doubt any of them will fully appreciate the efforts I'm making to make things easier for them, but nonetheless, it makes me look good when it comes time for a raise. A tech savvy colleague on campus pointed me to a nifty little tool called Jing which lets you record audio and what's happening on your screen. With this, it sounded like an excellent opportunity to use new technology to train people on the intricacies of this system. Little did I know how frustrating this project would be.

If I'm lucky, I can record one 5 minute video a day. If I trip over my tongue, it's back to the beginning. I've basically had to isolate myself in my office with the door closed and the ringer on the phone turned down as low as I can. I quickly found out, I cannot improv my way through a tutorial like I can in class. If I stumble over some words in class, no big deal. If this turns out to be as big as I expect it to be, every college and university in the state of Alabama could be using these videos, so I want them to be as perfect as possible.

So, for weeks, I've been perfecting my process. I have spent up to 15 minutes at a time perfecting what I want to say for a 30 second section. This has worked out fairly well except for being time intensive. The restarts are minimal because I make sure of what I want to say and how I want it to sound. The restarts are still aggravating when they happen, though. I've completed a video before and reviewed it only to discover I used the wrong term somewhere in the middle. I had to redo the whole thing. I wish I had some way to edit these videos so that when I flub up or the system times out, I can cut out that little part. Today, I was cruising right along when the system encountered an error. It was bad enough I already had to restart about half a dozen times, but now there's an error I can't get past to finish. I have to wait for someone from LiveText to fix the problem before I can continue. I have serious doubts I can get all of these done before school starts this fall because there is a truckload of more important work coming in next week.