What I learned from a Gamer that I can use for my Teaching

My nephew is a gamer! You probably have one in your family if you dig around. He is the serious kind though. I define serious by how much time and money you spend on the hobby. I was shocked to see that my nephew spends about 6 hours a day doing live video streaming and he showed me set-up. He is a very talented musician but now works in IT...his other passion. So between the late nights shifts as he constantly needs to be on stand-by, he still gets the opportunity to game. I guess this is his way of connecting with his friends. How old is he?, I hear you asking. Well...I leave you guessing. His game-play is fantastic...Call of Duty and the rest. I was intrigued to hear that there are some gamers who do this for a living. I was even more impressed with the tech that he was using to stream his gaming live and apparently he has already garnered some followers.

So his gaming set-up includes a monitor, headset, webcam, computer and some speakers. What was key was the ability to capture video feed and switch between various sources and then stream it live to platforms like Youtube. What is appealing about this approach is that I can use old and new tech, so no need to upgrade everything. This, to me means that it is scalable. I have a MACbook Air, one of the older ones so I had to get a USB to HDMI video capture device since I wanted to capture from my GoPro 6. I tested the capture using and older Microsoft webcam and it worked well. Of course the older webcams do not have the hi resolutions that we are familiar with today so for consistency I would encourage a later model. I like the idea of attaching any device as it removes some of the mobility limitations that comes with the onboard camera on your computer. So what this means is that I am able to switch between my desktop and anything else that I want to show in a class or presentation. Oh, I also needed a mini HDMI adapter. This you can pick up at your local gadget shop or if you are an online shopper even better.

I hope to bring you updates once I have experimented some more. I almost forgot to give you the most important piece of info and that is the software that I used to stream called Streamlabs. Of course it is freely available. I'm not gonna pay for this stuff so why should you?