In this video I'm going to show you how to make tutorials for your students
using Loom. Loom has become my preferred
tutorial creation program for both teachers and students for several
reasons. The first is that no matter what type of access you have to Loom,
you can always record for an unlimited amount of time
and Loom offers its Pro features entirely free for teachers and students,
as long as you can verify that you're affiliated with a school.
I also just really like the call out features for the desktop version
of Loom and the other thing I like about it is the ease with which you can share
videos after they've been created. My name is
Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
So I'm going to show you the Chrome extension version of Loom,
as well as the desktop version that's available for Mac computers,
and at the end of this video I'm also going to show you how you can upload
your videos into a couple of different programs
to add interactivity features to them and make them significantly more dynamic
and useful for your teaching. If you appreciate the tips that I share in this
video, you can show your support by hitting the like button and sharing it
with other teachers that you know and also subscribe to my channel and hit the
notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates.
All right let's jump in and take a look now at why I think you should be using
Loom to create your video tutorials for students.
So to get to Loom, I'm just going to search for Loom
and then I'll click on the first link that pops up. Before we get in, I just
want to show you a little bit about the pricing structure here.
So if you click on pricing, you'll notice that the Pro
version is free for all educators and students to use.
It's pretty straightforward to get that Pro access, you just need to click on the
'Free for Educators' link. That will send you through the process
of answering some questions just to verify that you are in fact affiliated
with a school and you will need to sign up for the Pro
account with your school email address. If you want additional information, you
can also go to this "Loom for Education" page and there's information on this
page, for example, about how they comply with different privacy rules,
so if you need that information it's there for you to access. So first I'm
actually just going to show you what the entirely
free version looks like. So I'm going to go up here to 'Get Loom
for Free' and then we're going to start by just looking at the Chrome extension
version of Loom. So if you click 'Install
Extension,' it's going to send you over to the Chrome web store and there you can
click 'Add Extension' in order to add that extension to your
browser. And then once it's installed you'll just want to make sure that it is
actually pinned to your browser and then you'll
see the extension show up. So let's say that I want to create a video tutorial
for my students and I want to be showing them something
about this National Geographic web page. I'll start just by clicking on the
extension and then I'll click 'One-Click Access,'
in order to give Loom access to my microphone
and camera. Click 'Allow' and then you're going to see the Loom
interface pull up on your screen. So you'll notice that you can see my
image down in the bottom left hand side of the screen
as I'm recording and if you want to turn that off,
you can just go up to record 'Screen Only' in order to do so. And then a quick way
to verify that the sound is working is just to look at this wavelength here.
If it's moving then it's detecting your sound. You also have the option to record
your full desktop or just one tab. Personally I almost always
record my entire desktop, just because I'm usually jumping around
to multiple tabs and I want to make sure that everything gets recorded. So once
you're ready to record, you just click 'Start Recording,'
you'll be asked if you want to share your screen, select 'Share,'
and then you'll see that it initiates a countdown timer. When you're recording
you'll notice that you can do some basic things like toggle the menu
on or off, you could cancel the recording if you wanted to cancel it,
and you could also pause the recording if you needed to do something like stop
and take a breath or take a quick break. And then after
you're finished explaining what you want to explain,
you can end your recording by clicking on the green check
or by clicking on the extension above. Immediately after finishing that
recording, it's going to send you over to Loom's web page and once you get
there you'll see that your video is loading. So there are a couple of things
you can do on this page. You can change the title of
your video for example. So I'll just re-label this assignment so
that it aligns with my labeling system for the rest of the work that I assign
to my students. If you go to the settings cog, you can also check out some of the
different settings options. So for example you can turn on or off
the ability for people to comment on your video,
you can choose whether or not you want to receive email notifications when
people do make those comments, you can also turn on or off emoji
reactions to your video, as well as the ability for somebody to
be able to download the video. Now let's say that after recording there
are some sections of the video that you want to cut out, you can go to
the trim tool here, and another thing that I
really like about Loom is that you can drag that trim tool
wherever you want to go and trim out any part of the video, not
just parts from the beginning or end. So this video editor is incredibly easy
to use. All you need to do is drag the red bar
wherever you want to trim a section of your video.
So let's just say for example that there's a section in the middle of the
video that you don't want to be a part of your final recording.
You can go ahead and just drag that red bar over, then click 'Remove' and it will
get rid of that section. Once you're finished with the video, you
have a few different options for how you can access it.
You can download it here and we're going to look at that in just a moment,
or you can copy the link and then share it with your students, either
through email or just posting it wherever you need them to be able to
access the video. You'll see that you can also change the
share settings so you can choose how restrictive you would like
access to this video to be, but one thing I like about it is that it's set to a
default where anyone with the link is able to view it, so you don't have to
worry about actually going in and changing the share settings so that
somebody is able to watch it. Now I want to show you the downloadable
app version of Loom. So again you will only be able to use
this downloadable app if you are a Mac user. To get it, just click 'Download
App,' then you'll go through the process of installing the application and when
you're ready to record your screen, you can either search for Loom in the
applications or click on it in the menu bar
at the top of your screen. You'll see that the interface is very similar to
the extension version. There are some additional functions however that I'm
going to show you. So if you prefer to customize the image
that shows up on your icon, you can just upload an
image from your computer and then use that image instead. So you
can bring in whatever you want, if you have a Bitmoji
you could bring that in as well. And then you can do this with the extension
version as well, but you can also resize that image icon so that it's
bigger or smaller. With this desktop version you do have
some different options for how you would share your screen. So for
example you can choose to just share a custom sized part of your screen.
So here this is going to function very similar to a screenshot,
you'll see that I can just drag over the part of the screen that I want to share
and it will only share that part of the screen with students. You'll see that
after you click 'Start Recording,' it will pop
up a menu bar on the left hand side of the screen and there is a draw tool here
that I really like. So it'll allow you to select some different thicknesses for
your electronic stylus and then you can also customize the
color. So you could use this to point to specific places on your screen that you
want to call students' attention to and the really cool thing about it is
that the digital ink doesn't stay permanently on the screen, it's just a
temporary feature, so you can use it a little bit more
fluidly and it has more functionality I think than something that would
just be permanently there on the screen. It's kind of a perfect blend between
a laser pointer that would go away immediately and more permanent marking
over the web page, so I really like it, it's a pretty cool
tool. And then if you didn't have the draw tool selected,
you could also call students' attention to places on the screen
by just using the mouse click call out, which will add this little pop
bubble when you click on a part of the screen. You'll see that after you stop
the recording, it's going to send you back to a Loom
web page again and this time rather than sharing a link,
I'm going to choose to download this file. So what I'm going to show you now
are a couple of ways that you could add some interactivity questions to your
tutorials to set them up so that students have to
answer questions as they're proceeding through watching your video.
So right now there are two good options for this. The first option
is Edpuzzle. So you'll see here that when I'm in the Edpuzzle homepage,
I can go to 'Add Content,' then I can upload the tutorial that I just
downloaded onto my computer into the Edpuzzle interface. After I've
added my video, I can go to edit mode and then I can add
custom questions wherever I would like in the video
that students will have to answer in order to proceed. Edpuzzle also runs
reports so that you're able to see how students performed on separate
questions and I have a whole separate video about that,
that I recommend you check out. And if you watched a previous video about some
exciting announcements for updates with Nearpod, you'll also know
that Nearpod now offers this feature as well. So if you're
on the Nearpod homepage, you'll see that you're able to select
'Video' as one of the types of lessons that you can create.
That will also give you an option to upload a video
into Nearpod and then you can also add interactivity tools to this video that
students would need to answer. These are fully customizable and if you're running
a live Nearpod lesson with your students,
you can actually see their answers to those questions coming through
on your teacher interface in real time. And then after the fact you can also
pull reports so that you're able to see exactly how
students answered on each of the different questions. This
ability to add interactivity to video is a huge step up from having students
just watch a video all the way through with no checks for
understanding, so I definitely recommend that you take advantage of these
features and start pushing out interactive
tutorials made with Loom to your students. This video is teacher
directed and focused on how to use Loom for
creating tutorials for your classroom, however I also think that teaching
students how to screen record can be incredibly powerful. You can have
them create videos that prove that they're able to do certain things with
their computer, like perform basic foundational
technology skills or search for reliable sources online for
example and another way that screen capture can be really useful for
students is that if they're having some
difficulty with a program or some application that you're using with your
students, you can always have them take a screen capture video
and then send that to you, so that you can evaluate what's going on. So if
you're interested in using Loom with students, I've also put a link
to a student tutorial for Loom. That will direct you over to my other YouTube
channel that's just for education technology
tutorials for students and that channel is COPPA compliant, so
you don't have to worry about it collecting any data with your
students, so it is safe to use in the classroom. Thank you so much for
watching my video to the end. If you found the tips that I shared
helpful, please share it with other teachers that you know,
hit the like button, and subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell
to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates. You can also check out
some of the other tutorials I have on my channel by clicking on one of those two
videos above and if you're interested in downloading
any of the resources that I've created and show on my videos, please visit my
website at www.newedtechclassroom.com. Lastly if you want to check me out on
social media, my Twitter handle, Facebook page, and Pinterest account are
all in the description below. Thanks so much and have a great week!