Panopto is Champlain’s new video recording software and is now available to all faculty and students. It was selected for its user-friendly interface and its excellent functionality, including features that support the easy creation of universally-accessible course content.
Primarily, you’ll probably use Panopto for:
- Prerecording video content for your students
- Asking students to record video content (presentations, etc.)
- Recording synchronous class sessions (there’s a Zoom integration that makes this very easy)
Panopto makes it easy to close-caption any videos recorded either by you or by your students. Once captions have been processed by Panopto (which can take a few hours), those captions then become searchable! This will be a real boon for students with accommodations or students who need to catch up after a few missed classes, and it’s also a handy way to enable all your students to review material you’ve discussed in class.
There are four ways you can access Panopto:
- Via the Panopto website (go to Panopto.com)
- By downloading an app for your PC or Mac
- By using the Panopto app on your smartphone
- Through Canvas
Recording Synchronous Class Sessions
Using Panopto with Canvas
- Here’s a video tutorial showing how to use Panopto with Canvas. (29:35, but there is a table of contents so you can jump to what you need)
Using Panopto on Your Computer
Panopto’s written instructions and video tutorials are clear, concise, and easy to follow. The only thing that is confusing about them is the navigation to get to them on the Panopto support site!
Therefore, we’ve created this handy annotated index to the instructions and videos you’re most likely to need. The content in the written instructions and the videos is quite similar – so you can simply choose the format you prefer for learning.
Want to learn about Panopto without clicking back and forth between all these different videos? Here’s a helpful playlist of “featured videos” (i.e. the most commonly needed ones).
Finding and Viewing Videos in the Panopto Video Library
- Simple written instructions for finding and viewing a video in Panopto
- Slightly more detailed instructions for navigating the video library in Panopto
- A video tutorial on how to find and view a video in Panopto (2:10)
In Panopto, you can search both the titles and the full contents of videos by keyword! If you want to get a quick tutorial on this search functionality, here’s a video that explains how Panopto’s search features work (1:21)
Sharing Videos
In Panopto, you can restrict a video to specific people; allow people at Champlain with a link to view it (a good way to share a video with a class); allow anyone with the link to view it; or make it open to the public. Here’s how to do that:
Recording Videos
- Written instructions for recording videos
- A video tutorial on how to record videos in Panopto (4:27 in total, but if you’re using a PC, you can stop at 3:21)
Captioning Videos
Panopto will automatically caption videos that you record. However, there are two important things you need to know:
- It takes at least eight hours to process captions for a short video – and as long as a day for a longer video. It’s not immediate. You need to build time into your class planning to allow for this.
- Automatic captioning isn’t perfect – for best results, you need to check the captions and make adjustments to them manually.
- Here are written instructions for creating and editing automatic captions.
- Here is a video tutorial on how create and edit automatic captions. (2:22)