The Drupal Dojo has 20-seat screen-sharing account with the DimDim service that is available for the wider Drupal community to use any time anyone wants. We encourage Dojo people and any Drupal folk to make use of this resource.
If you're curious about how this works, the best thing is just to try it out. Here's how:
- Log in to DimDim as the drupaldojo user, which is the account manager. Login information is available here.
- On the left hand side, click "Host Meeting". You may want to pick a descriptive meeting name and add invitees on the "General" tab, and possibly also set a lengthy meeting time on the "Features" tab.
- Click "Start" and let DimDim check your system settings. It's a flash-dependent application that works most of the time. Contact their tech support to help them expand compatibility if you have issues.
- DimDim will ask what you want to do with your meeting. Tell it you're interested in "Sharing your Computer Screen." At this time it may also need to install a plugin, with the same caveats about compatibility as above.
- You should now be set to have others view your screen. To get others in the room, you need to give them the url, which can be found by clicking on the (easily missed) "room name" link in the blue bar, just to the left of the dial-in information.
- Paste the url into #drupal-dojo, email, IM, twitter, blog posts, etc.
- When you're ready to begin, click the "record" button in the DimDim interface. Even if you are also capturing the lesson locally for higher-quality results, it never hurts to have a server-side backup.
- When you are done, stop recording. Note that dimdim is limited in that you can only start/stop once per lesson, so no pausing for a break. ;)
- After you complete your lesson, DimDim will process it into an embed-friendly FLV file. It will take some time, but check back in an hour or two and click on the "Search Meetings" link on the left hand side of the main dashboard to find your lesson and get access to the server-side recording.
Tips For Winners
Note: DimDim still does not support screencasting (i.e. sharing your desktop) from Linux :(
TODO: add best-practice doc links here for client-side screencapture tools, presentation preparation, editing, planning, etc