March 27, 2014

Making app tutorials on the Ipad

How can I create a video with the Cartoonatic app?

This post started with a question from one of the participants of the online course Jennifer Verschoor and I have been moderating this month.

As the online course is about MLearning and we've been exploring several apps, I sent the following cartoonatic video to participants at the beginning of Week 4.



The video was recorded with the CARTOONATIC app I have downloaded to my ipad. After that, I downloaded it to youtube as a video. It could also have been shared in different ways as facebook, e-mail, twitter or saving it my camera roll. After sharing the video with participants, Erika downloaded the app to her iphone and sent me the question mentioned above after having problems.

My next question, this time to myself, was:

How can I make this tutorial?

When using my laptop it's quite easy to create screencasts showing what to do, but with the ipad, it's not so easy, at least, as far as I know. I would have to use AN APP TO EXPLAIN HOW TO USE ANOTHER APP.

My first trial was with the app SNAPGUIDE:


Check out How to Use Cartoonatic by Ana Menezes on Snapguide.

Now, how did I make this Snapguide?
1. I took screenshots of the images from my ipad.
2. I inserted the arrows and texts to the images using SKITCH app and saved the images to my ipad again.
3. I used SNAPGUIDE app to create the tutorial slideshow and then grabbed the link to share.

My second trial was with the app SHOWME:



This one I liked best as I could add my voice and draw arrows on the images while explaining.
I sent the link to my own e-mail, clicked the link, clicked SHARE and grabbed the embed code for publishing.

In conclusion, with both apps, I had to base the tutorial on static screenshots taken with my ipad. I keep wondering if there is an app which allows us to record video tutorials of ourselves while we use an app. I know some people mirror their ipads to their laptops and then make a screencast, but is there a way to do that with an APP? Wondering ........


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post! I have been wondering about this too. One question, to make the tutorial with Showme, did you also work with screenshots of the other app?
Yuly

Ana Maria Menezes said...

Yeah, I used the screenshots I had taken with my ipad. My next post is going to be about how to record app tutorials mirroring your ipad to your laptop.