Screen casts

This week I will be reviewing several screen casts. Screen casts allow a person to explain and add voice to website or presentations I  want to say do not waste your time on anything but ScreencastOmatic. I will give more details on the screen cast systems I used. However, the time I spent just trying to get them to work was ridiculous. Creating the videos are great but you have to be able to share them for them to worthwhile.

Camtasia Studio

(www.camtasia.com)

When I could not get screenr to work, I searched for an alternate site. This was the site I found. I was so excited to get a free trial of this awesome program. This is professional grade all the way. Annotations can be added. Each portion is treated as a track on its own. For example, your voice is one track, your photo is another track, and lastly the screen is a separate track. This makes editing so much easier. This program has lots of extras like annotations on the screen and editing abilities. I loved creating on this site. Now for the reality. Publishing and sharing from this sight was a nightmare. I was logged on to my google drive and cookies were allowed. The site repeatedly told me my cookies were disabled. I had to save several versions of the screen cast to get the video below. I am not sure the video will even load properly to play. I am not sure if this is on purpose to get the user to buy the paid subscription. The subscription is $299 but for educators the price is $179. I would not recommend this program unless you plan on doing lots of screen casts. Other free options exist that are just as good if not better. At the point I found this site, I did not realize it was connected to Jing. So Jing is free and my comments about Jing are listed below.

Jing

(https://www.techsmith.com/jing.html)

Jing is the little sister to Camtasia. The basic difference is the upgraded editing benefits. For example, three tracks can be edited independently versus all items on one track on Jing. Also, Camtasia allows for web recording as well as voice recording. In fact, Jing has to be edited in Camtasia. I am not really fond of either. I saved the format in various ways but the video did not play. I finally uploaded to my youtube channel, which I did not want to do, and the video loaded from there. The time and effort that goes into creating the screen cast are not worth it. I am happy providing simple screen cast to my staff and students on topics they need to know that do not aggravate me as much as this site did. I do not like the "sun" hanging out at the top of my screen either. The sun is the icon for the site. This loads at the top of your screen. This is how you access the site. I would rather just have an icon on my desktop like all the other sites.Again, I would not recommend this site as it is far to complex and time consuming.

Screencast-O-Matic

(www.screencast-o-matic.com)

Screencast-O-Matic is a great screen cast system. I asked a few other people and they quickly referred me to this site. This site is easy to navigate without complex buttons. I struggled in the beginning trying to get the software to start where I wanted it to start. But out of all the screen cast sites, this is by far the easiest and best. For me, I do not need a professional grade screen cast that takes hours to create. I need to be able to create the video quickly and move on to the next project. I would like a few upgrades such as annotating the video but can live without that. This is a great site to start learning screen cast. At some point if I get better, I may want a more advanced site. This would be the place to start and this site is what I would share with my students.This is a basic no frills site that gets the job done quickly.

Explain Everything
iPad App

This is an app for $3.99. I did not purchase the app. However, this is just another option. I am a strong believer in free. So, if you have purchased the app let me know in the comments how it worked for you.

All in all, screen cast are fun. Videos are a great way to inform both teachers and students. The video provides details and actually shows the user how to access or retrieve the information they seek. I will be creating more screen casts in the future. The screen casts just makes sharing directions so much easier.