by Karen Nichols
I attended a presentation on using social media to engage underrepresented students at the most recent Online Learning Consortium in Orlando. Several apps were discussed and Twitcam was one of them. I decided to investigate it for myself. If you go to the twitcam website: http://twitcam.livestream.com/ the directions say you can begin in three easy steps. Well, that wasn't quite my experience, but it was still pretty easy just the same.
So, from the Twitcam homepage, I was told that Flash needed to be installed.
Then I was told to set up my webcam. Fortunately, mine is built in.
Next I have to log into Twitter. But wait, there is no sign of Twitcam inside my Twitter. What they should say is to "scroll down to the bottom of the Twitcam page and click on Broadcast Live. THEN you'll be taken to Twitter where you can log in and see Twitcam.
Once there, you must "allow" Twitcam to access your webcam and microphone and then it really is easy to follow their directions. You will be tweeting live which could be a really wonderful learning experience for various concepts you're teaching.
When finished, click on stop recording and you'll be asked if you want to archive your video. So not only could you reach students as you streamed your video live, you can provide the link to the video for anyone who missed it or who would like to replay it later.
So here's just a quick example of a twitcam video I made. Because this is a free service, you'll have to view all or part of an ad before the video will play. Since you can tweet as you're videotaping, you can add the text of what you're saying to make it accessible since I don't see any way to add captions, or add something else like an assignment. You can provide a link to the archived video or embed it.
I'm really interested to know if you think you may like to try something like this and create a video tweet spree for your students. If you do, please share!