Screencasting tools & tips

I find screencasting a very useful strategy when I want to demonstrate how to do something on a computer. If I record what is on my computer screen (which is what a screencast is), then my target audience (e.g. my students or you my blog readers) can watch the video, pausing it or replaying it as needed. You can also refer back to it at any time.

There are a variety of free and cross-platform tools to create a screencast. My favorite, in order of preference, are:

1. Screencast-O-Matic
2. Screencastify (Chrome store app) 
3. Jing

I created the following short screencast using Screencast-O-Matic to demonstrate what a screencast can look like, and also I use this screencast to show you the websites for the above mentioned tools.

To share your screencast:

There are different options for this, and which you use depends on your audience and privacy levels you want to retain for your video.

1. Easy and public: upload your video to YouTube (you have to have a Google Account to do this). This is what I used to share the above video. I used the embed code of the video so that I could insert (embed) the video into my blog here, but you can also just provide the link to the video.
2. Upload video to your Google Drive, and then share the link to your video (you can make the video sharing settings public, so anyone can view, or you can give access only to select groups or people). If you are teaching at a school or university and are have created a Google Group for your class, you can share the video just with your class by pasting the Google Group name in to the "share" settings. 
3. If you use a Learning Management System (like Moodle, Blackboard) you can upload the video to your course site.
4. If you use website hosting site like Weebly and use the free version, then you can include videos in your website, but cannot upload the video to your Weebly account (that comes with the paid version of Weebly). To include a video on your website, you need to upload it to YouTube or to your Google Drive and then link to it or embed it that way.