Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Easy Screen Recording with Screencastify”.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use screencastify to easily create screen recordings, and you can do it for free now. The thing about screencastify is that it’s a Google Chrome extension, so it lives here in Google Chrome. So this tutorial is pretty specific to people that use Google, Chrome and, of course, that includes all Chromebook owners and in a previous video of mine, I talked about screencast-o-matic, which is a great free option. It works really well and there is an option that works on Chromebooks if you’re interested in learning about screencast-o-matic. Please watch my video, but other people prefer alternatives and screencastify is a great alternative, especially if you want your video to be easily synced and organized into your Google Drive account. So let’s jump right in and take a look at screencastify how to get it and how to use it in Google Chrome. So here I am on my Google home page, and you can see that I have a button here, a shortcut that takes me to the google chrome store and specifically the extensions part of that. So if I click on it, it takes me to the Chrome Web Store extensions. If you don’t see that on your Google home page, that’s okay, you can just do a search for Google Chrome store and the first result should be the right. One takes you right to the same place, so I’m gon na do a search for screencastify. It brings up this extension here and I’ll just click Add to Chrome. At this point, Google notifies me of what screencastify is gon na do, and I’m ok with that. So I click add extension and immediately because I am signed in to my account look what happens.
It adds screencastify right here into my list of Google Chrome extensions for you. If you’re not signed in to your browser, you might need to do that in order to fully install this into your browser. Okay, now that that’s installed, if I want to create a video, all I have to do is click and maybe open up a new tab or whatever I need to do and go to a website. Let’S say that I want to record so let’s say I’m a teacher and I’d like to show my students a video demonstration of how to use a tool like flip, which is a great teacher and student tool. As you probably guessed, I do have a video tutorial to show you how to use it, but to create a recording of this. All I have to do now is go over here to the screencastify Chrome extension and I clicked on it, and it does want me to sign in to my Google account that’s step one to get this fully set up.
So I click sign in with Google. I’M gon na click on my account and allow screencastify to do the following things once I click allow I’m on to step two. This is encouraging me to unlock all features by enabling the camera and microphone and also the drying and annotation tools.
So I click Next and I get some pop ups. It’S requesting permission for these things, so I say allow and then I say, allow next, I’m supposed to say what my role is. Am i a student, a corporate user, I’m actually an educator so I’ll click that and what level I could put a couple different levels here.
I guess but I’ll go with grade school. So now I’m done and a nice video opens up to kind of show me some of the steps for recording. But at this point I’m just gon na close out of this tab, I’m ready to record my flipgrid video. Now you should only have to do those three steps that we just did with screencastify, just one time at least on any particular computer once you’re signed in you should be good to go alright.
So to start my tutorial on flipgrid, I’m just gon na click here and as you can see, there is an advertisement here trying to get me to upgrade to the professional version of screencastify. If I do that, I can create videos that are longer than 10 minutes. So that is one of the limitations of the screencastify lite free account is my videos have to be ten minutes or less also, I can only create up to fifty videos per month now, if you think about that, that’s pretty good. It would be kind of hard to create more than 50 videos a month, so this free version of screencastify, I think, really is a good one.
Next, I need to decide what do I want to record? Do I want to record a particular browser tab? Do I want to record my desktop? Do I want to record the webcam only in this case, I really could pick probably either one the browser tab. My desktop I’m gon na go with desktop. In this case. My microphone is turned on next to microphone.
It says select and, as you can see, there’s a meter next to that, and that shows me that screencast, if I can already hear my voice, it already consents my voice. But I want to click to make sure that it’s using the right microphone, the built-in mic or an additional mic that you might have plugged in and in my case it’s set up properly. Next, I have to decide if I want a webcam. If I do this, it will record my face, in addition to my voice and everything that I do on the computer and a lot of people like this option.
Just so you know the educational research on this shows that in many cases enabling the webcam so that the person who’s talking can be seen in the video really acts as more of a distraction. In most cases, now there are exceptions for that, but in most cases it’s most effective. If you turn off the webcam but we’ll try it both ways. Next, I can just click record and you’ll, see the webcam will start up here and then here on the screen.
I get to select what to record and I’m just gon na record the entire screen, not just an application window. So, even though I chose to record the desktop, if you recall, it’s still gon na record anything that it can see here on my screen, all right. I’Ll go ahead and click share, I get a countdown and then it begins. Hi students I’d like to show you how to use this wonderful website called flipgrid.
Now, as I record, this screencastify is recording everything I do with the mouse. Everything that I do with scrolling. It also records clicks, as you can see, there’s a circle that appears around the mouse.
When I click also, I want you to see that you can resize the webcam recording. If you want to just by clicking and dragging the corner, you can also close out of it if you’re done with it – and I am done with it now, while you’re recording your screencasts or videos you’ll notice here in the lower left corner that you do have Some tools, you can pause the recording and then resume when you’re ready to resume. We also have some options for the mouse pointer.
You can see that there’s a little halo effect if you want to turn and there are other options as well. You also have a whiteboard marker. Basically, so, as I just did, you can click and drag to draw on the screen to circle things or draw arrows to things and that’s all recorded. We do have an eraser as well. If you want to erase that stuff – and you can toggle the webcam on by clicking this button and turn it off by pressing it again, we also have a timer. If you want to time yourself as you record and then the X actually hides those options, all right, let’s say I’m done with my tutorial on flip grid.
I can just go down here and click stop sharing and you saw what happened. It took me to the screencastify website and my video recording starts immediately. I can click and drag to advance through the recording.
If I would like and I can play from there appear across the top. I have some options and tools that I can use. You can see that there’s an option to crop or trim the video if I click that it takes me to another screen and it starts my video and then I can use these scissors here to trim out the beginning of the video.
If I would like – and I can also trim out the end of the video now unfortunately to be able to save this edit – I would have to go premium. I’D have to upgrade to the paid account, so I’m gon na have to cancel out of that and go back to this page here, similar to crop and trim. There is an edit option at this point.
It wants me to sign in to my Google account again – and this is another paid feature that I would have to upgrade in order to use so I’m gon na X out of that for now, there’s also a delete button to just trash this and start over And we also have a way to share the video online either to YouTube or to your Google Drive account. I’M gon na close that, for now there is an option to save to disk, including export as mp4 notice, that that is a paid feature. And so that’s why some people do stick with screencast-o-matic, because you can save an mp4, but in screencastify there is a nice option to save the video to disk it downloads it as a web em file and I’ll show you what that’s like in just a minute, But before I do look at this panel at the right, if I want to, I can enable people to comment on my videos, and those comments will appear next to my videos in Google Drive notice that it’s also uploaded automatically to my Google Drive account, and I Can copy the link to that file in my Google Drive account just by clicking here. I can also click view on Drive it’ll open up. My Google Drive account and show me that video here it is it’s still being processed, but this is the video that I just recorded, that’s being automatically saved to my Google Drive. It gives me some details about the video here as well.
Okay, I want to see what this downloaded file is like, so I’m just gon na click. This arrow here show in finder, and here it is I’ve downloaded it a couple of times now. If I double click on this, it doesn’t really open.
That’S the downside to this not being an mp4 file. However, if I right-click on it and say open with Google Chrome begins, the video starts right in my web browser and that’s what a WebM file is for it’s for playing video files through a browser. Now the good side of that is, if you do share this video, whether to YouTube or through your Google Drive account, people will be able to easily watch the video through their browser. So thanks for watching, I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and when you do subscribe. Please click the bell next to the subscribe button.
If you do you’ll be notified whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday, if you’d like to support my youtube channel, consider becoming a supporter of mine through my patreon account and you’ll see a link to that in the Description below speaking of patreon, I want to do a quick shout out to my five-dollar patreon supporters, and they are mihaela Nagina and kurt Topol and Sharmon natoli. I want to send out a special thank you to those five dollar patreon supporters. I’M also grateful for all of my patreon supporters. .