Recommendations for a Teacher Moving Class Online with Ubuntu Mate

Support & Help Requests
1

I have been transitioning my teaching to online, which has created the need to make lots of videos. I'm looking for either software or workflow suggestions to improve what I'm currently doing on Ubuntu Mate. I would like the following:

  • Picture in Picture with my webcam and a presentation in the same screen.

I have been using vokoscreen, which has been functional. It allows me to record one of my dual displays. It allows me to have a separate webcam view, but I've been having an issue getting the picture in picture effect. If I use LibreOffice Impress it fills the whole screen and doesn't let me keep a webcam view over the top of the presentation. I've been using Google Slides because I can still have Google Slides in presentation mode but have it in a regular window instead of full screen. Then I can use the Mate window feature "Always on top" to keep the webcam window over that. Also vokoscreen is light on resources (system only has 4gigs of RAM and an older Intel i3 CPU), also the resulting file size that I get to upload to Youtube has been small (32 megs for a 16 minute video) Things I don't like:

  • Webcam window has regular window title bar which is kind of chunky looking.
  • I can't use Impress with the webcam window over top of the presentation.
  • I need to use Google Slides, but I prefer Impress (more features)

Any suggestions for improvements?

Also any additional software that you would recommend to use to make the online education I can offer even better? (Maybe a digital whiteboard I could use while teaching, or other useful tools for creating assignments and lessons.)

Thanks in advance.

2

Hello mowestusa

You might want to consider OBS Studio. There is quite a lot to learn.

You might find these useful:

(1)

(2)


(3)

Good luck :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
3

You could try onlyoffice. It has a snap option.

4

Thanks @alpinejohn, I thought about OBS Studio. Thanks as well for the video tutorial links as well. I will have to run some tests with it, to see if my older laptop that I'm using to make these educational videos is up to the task of running OBS Studio, that might be my bottle neck in using it.

5

Do you know if Only Office, their presentation program, has the ability to display the presentation in a normal window instead of full screen? If so it might be worth giving that a try with what I'm currently using vokoscreen. Thanks for the suggestion.

6

Apparently the online version can, but not the desktop version you install according to the help docs. You could try it here https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ and see if that does what you want.

1 Like
7

Ok, I see, that is the same behavior I get with Google Slides which makes sense because it is an online office presentation program. I'll probably stick with Google Slides if I can't get away from having an open browser window. Good idea though to take a look at some of the other office software available on Ubuntu Mate.

1 Like