Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Knowmia, Knowmia, Wherefore Art Though, Knowmia?

I knew I was playing with fire when I decided to use an iPad Screencasting/Tutorial app that doesn't allow people to export to YouTube nor any kind of useable video file.  After spending approximately 3 hours on a Knowmia Screencast on Monday (8-12-13) night (after the first-day-of-school, mind you!) it would NOT upload to Knowmia.  Ugh.  I could have played it on my iPad if it had exported there.  But no, there it was, stuck in screencast purgatory (in my Dropbox) as a .ktl file.

After an evening of exporting what I thought was going to help me through my day, I got this message:



Then this:  


I went to Knowmia to see if magically the tutorial was in my account, but Knowmia told me this:


Huh?????  So I left my iPad running at home so hopefully it would upload again.... it never did.

The people from Knowmia were quite nice and supportive when I emailed them.  Said they would retrieve the file from my Dropbox and put it on my Knowmia account. But too little too late.  I had to do a lot more work the next morning.  I had PLANNED to go through the tutorial with students to show them how to pause, rewind, etc.  I was going to have it up so students who missed the second day of school could just "watch the video." But instead I had to do twice the work on half as much sleep.

Today I went on the App Store to update my iPad.  The latest Knowmia Update was a doozy.  It rolled out the SAME DAY I had my great failure. 





I have learned that I should have stuck with an old standby (Explain Everything), but I wanted to learn a new program.  Maybe I'll come back to Knowmia.  I love the "Teacher in a Picture" feature - as I have blogged about and tweeted about before.  I really like the "library" of pictures that can be imported and manipulated.  I did go through the tutorial many times trying to figure it out in previous weeks to my Knowmia attempt.  I'll need to have Knowmia more stable before I'll try again. 

Next on my list - Camtasia for Mac Desktop!