Screencasts

Screencasts provide students, teachers, and community members with learning experiences in the classroom as well as via the Internet. They allow teachers to digitally record any activity that is performed on a computer, narrate the activity or directions, and use them as learning resources, tasks, and to support anyone who needs to see a visual presentation on how something is done on the computer.  While I had viewed screencasts before and found them very helpful, I had not created one myself.  I looked at four different web tools to determine which one would work best for me.

The first site that I visited was Screencast-o-matic.  This was the only web-based tool that I could use at my school because our Internet filter blocks other sites due to file hosting or adult content. Screencast-o-matic offers a free version or a Pro account for $15 per year.  The Pro account offers longer videos, the ability to edit your recordings, records from screen and webcam at the same time, and helps your to manage your videos.  The free account works fine for most people and you can sign up easily by using your e-mail address.  The first thing that I noticed was that because it is java based, it does not play well with Chrome which is my browser of choice. Chrome will actually launch the site using a downloaded recorder which worked well.  There is a video tutorial to teach how to use the recording interface.  It also offers a resizeable recording window, one click recording of audio and video, and the ability to upload to YouTube.  Overall, it was very easy to use.  It would be nice to be able to edit the video, but I prefer not to pay for the video tool if I don't need to.  I easily loaded my video to my YouTube channel so I can embed it in blogs and webpages without any issues.  One thing I did notice was that after I loaded it to YouTube, it looked rather grainy and I had to change the setting to make it a higher resolution video.

The second tool that I looked at was Screenr.  Unfortunately, I was unable to use Screenr because it was retired as of November 11th because it is Java-based.  Google Chrome can not run Screenr because it doesn't run Java.

Next, I tried Jing.  Jing is a program that must be downloaded to your computer.  It was not difficult to record video with Jing, but after that I ran into a couple of issues.  My biggest issue was that after I recorded the video, it was very slow to process and upload to the Screencast.com site where it is stored.  Your other option is to save it to your computer.  Neither one worked well. I received error messages after waiting 20 minutes for my video to upload.  Then when I saved it to my hard drive to upload to YouTube instead, it saved it as a .swf file which none of my video editors could read and YouTube couldn't find anything but audio in the file.  I never could get the video from the TechSmith Screencast.com website and was unable to convert it to a usable format. This tool was not convenient at all and I will not be using it again.

I looked at several reviews to find a screencasting tool that would work best for me.  I decided to give Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 a try.  What was appealing to me is that it is a free downloadable program from Microsoft that allows you to edit your video with Microsoft Movie Maker.  I do on occasion use Movie Maker and I really like the idea of being able to add transition slides to the beginning, banners, and background music to make a professional looking screencast.  Expression was just as easy to use as the other programs and was encoded into a Mp4 with the simple click of a button.   This is the tool that I plan on using in the future.  

Overall, the screencasting tools were simple to use - except for my issues with Jing.  I was really surprised out how easy screencasting can be.  You should check out these screencasting tools and see what you think.

Happy Screencasting!

-Lisa