Originally posted by Kate Quinn on June 4, 2018
Last week, I attended the Advancing Learning conference at Fanshawe College in London Ontario which explores tech in post-secondary classrooms. One of the most intriguing speakers introduced me to an app called Touchcast. Students now are constantly ‘expressing their cultural identity fluently across all of their mature media channels’ (from Dr. Vogt’s Module 3 Review). Touchcast’s use of vApps (Video Apps) allows students to interact in real-time with elements of a presentation directly from that Touchcast; they can scroll a twitter feed, check out a website, click through photos, all within that video presentation – the Touchcast. With this mobile app, you can create a video by recording with or without a green screen, following the teleprompter, and adding other media through these vApps as you go. Whether for student presentation use or for teachers of online courses, this creates an interactive, compelling ‘transmedia storyworld’.
With our hyper-twitch culture and smooth video and audio production, it’s unavoidable that students expect professional videos and interactive presentations. Touchcast enables teachers and students to create beautifully integrated lectures and assignments on iOS. If you’re new to Touchcast, like I was, this video will give you a quick overview of its capabilities and aesthetic.
Have you used Touchcast in the classroom? What were your experiences?
I was curious about Touchcast after Kate’s review, so I downloaded it to check it out. I was particularly interested in seeing the community and content creation aspect of the tech. I like the idea of this app in theory but in use it was a frustrating experience.
The good: you can pull in media from most of the well-used cloud services such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and from your device, a map, web page, memo, clipboard, or your last photo. You can narrate over the top of that media, and there is a small circle shaped video of your talking head, so viewers can see you and your content.
The bad: There are no more than 30 current channels to watch, and a tag search of the ubiquitously popular tag “cats” resulted in two Touchcasts. There’s no category search or trending casts or anything I can use to explore without using tags or channels, and there’s not much to explore. What little content there is is not timestamped or dated, so I couldn’t tell how recent the posts were. One of the channels was the Wall Street Journal, but the content posted was from the 2016 U.S. presidential election, so it seems most everything there is stale.
The ugly: It’s clear no one is using this app, so there’s no community. There were also so many technical issues – sound didn’t work until I used headphones and the app logged me out every time I switched programs on my iOs device – and UX flaws that would prevent me from using it further. I don’t recommend Touchcast in its current form as a valuable demonstration of mobile culture or technology.
Original comment posted by Kate Quinn @mkquinn, August 5, 2018
Having made this post about TouchCast earlier in the semester, I decided to use it to present my A3: The Future of Language Learning. TouchCast is a relatively easy program to navigate, but they updated and changed their platform on July 8th – they now have TouchCast Studio, the mobile editing platform, and TouchCast Pitch as the desktop presentation version. I wanted to be able to create and edit the video on my desktop, so began my project in TouchCast Pitch. Pitch was a great way to create a movie-like presentation and was the easiest part of my TouchCast adventure. I created scenes from a template (much like you’d create slides in PowerPoint from templates), and inserted the text for the teleprompter in each scene. The audio was the biggest challenge – I only had access to my computer mic and was unable to hear the hums and crackles in the audio until the final processing had already finished. The main thing that separates TouchCast from other video editing software is their vApps – Video Apps – that you can insert into the presentation. Had there been more options for vApps in Pitch, I’d’ve used that program for the final edit. However, I wanted to use some of the website vApps, so decided to move to the Studio editor on an iPad. This is where things got a little messy. Studio didn’t want to let me use an mP4 (I’d edited the audio again in iMovie to clean it up a bit) because of the huge size. Because you can annotate a YouTube video in Studio, I tried uploading the video to YouTube and going that route; the video simply wouldn’t load, even when I changed the visibility to public, so I scratched the mP4 version and had to go with the original TouchCast video prepared in Pitch. Even that was messy; because I’d exported as a tct version, I was unable to add vApps in Studio to this video (despite the fact that there’d been no vApps in the original). After many emails back and forth with customer support, they conceded that moving between Pitch and Studio was a ‘relatively new workflow’ and that my issues would be brought to the developers. I eventually saved my TouchCast file as a tcp (project) file, uploaded it to TouchCast Fabric (their cloud service), and then accessed it in Studio. The load time for the website vApps was incredibly slow. When recording the video with the vApps included, there’d be a blank window on the vApp corresponding with the length of time needed to load the website. I resorted to screenshots of websites or photos and then inserting links so that the presentation would be smoother. All in all, it was a steeper learning curve to use TouchCast than I’d expected. I’ll use it again, because I like the interactivity of the program, but would caution anyone using it to leave a solid week for ironing out the bugs and getting used to the process. Pitch, however, I would definitely use as a video presentation software, but would also recommend using a good audio set up. I imagine many of my issues are related to the relatively new release of these new platforms (Pitch, the new Studio, Fabric) and that it’ll become smoother in time.