Hi, my name is Sam Kary. I'm a public school teacher in San Francisco, and this
is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom. In this video I'm going to teach
you to use Screencastify to create simple tutorial videos for your students.
Making your own tutorial videos might sound like an advanced technique, but
with Screencastify you can easily create your own tutorial videos for free. I used
to dread the day when I would roll out new technology programs because my
students would have a million questions and I would find myself crazily running
around the room trying to problem-solve everyone's issues. Now, using tutorials I
make with Screencastify, I've pretty much entirely eliminated
that issue because students can work at their own pace. Plus, posting tutorial
videos to Google Classroom is a great way to keep parents in the loop about
the programs you're using in class.
Whenever I launch new technology in my classroom I always use a screen capture
program like Screencastify or ScreenFlow to create a tutorial video for my
students. I recommend using Screencastify as a teacher because it's really easy to
use, can be used on any computer, and it's also free. I make my new EdTech Classroom
videos using ScreenFlow. That's a program that costs money and you can only use it
on a Mac. I'll talk about ScreenFlow in a later tutorial video. Today I'm going to
be teaching you how you're going to get Screencastify as a Google Chrome
extension and start recording tutorial videos right away. The first thing that
you're going to want to do is go to your Chrome Webstore. In the Chrome Web Store
you can search for the Chrome Extension Screencastify you want to add this
extension to Chrome. Once it's been added, you'll see that you have a icon for
Screencastify that you can click on the top right side of your screen. When I
click on Screencastify for the first time it's going to ask me to set up some
different permissions. First, I'm going to sign in with Google. I do like to use
this option because then it saves files into my Google Drive that I can easily
upload onto my Google Classroom. It's going to ask me whether or not I want to
allow the program to use my camera, my microphone, as well as drawing and
annotation tools. I do want both those turned on, so I'm going to click allow. When
you choose Screencastify for the first time it's going to ask you to set up a
couple preferences. First you're going to need to set up your microphone. It's okay
to just use your internal microphone. if you want to use the webcam, which I
recommend:it's fun for students. Click on. Select your internal webcam as well,
and you'll be ready to record. Now you'll notice that you have 50 free videos for a
free Screencastify account, which to me is more than enough for a typical
educator. When you want to record you're going to go ahead, and you're gonna hit
that record button. One of the first instructional videos I record for my
students is how they use Google Classroom. When you're ready to record an
instructional video you're gonna go to the top right. Click the Screencastify
icon. You'll have some options. I usually choose to record my entire desktop. The
reason why is because if you record a browser tab and then toggle to another
browser, it's not going to record that browser. And I've had it happen several
times where I think I'm recording something, and I'm not it's pretty
frustrating if I lose the entire video. So now I just record my entire desktop. I
do like to leave the webcam embedded just because it's fun for students. When
I'm ready to record, I'll press that record button and you'll see that it's
going to ask you to select the desktop. You'll click share, and now it is
recording your video. The first thing that I want to show you is how you can actually
move around your webcam, so if it's in the way of some of the different texts
that you're trying to show students, or you just want to move it around to a
different place, you can do that. I also want to show you the annotations down at
the bottom of the screen. So the first one, if you want to pause your
Screencast video, you can do that there. To resume recording hit resume. The mouse
function is useful for calling out different parts of the screen. If you
want to focus the mouse on certain places, you can use the focus option. If
you want your mouse pointer to highlight when you click, you can click "highlight
click" and it will click wherever you point your mouse. Also really useful when
you're trying to draw attention to a particular place. If you want to make
annotations you can do so by clicking the little pencil. You can
choose different colors, so if there's a place, for example, that I wanted to
circle, I could circle or put a box to draw attention to that particular place
on the website. If you want to erase that you can click the eraser and it will
erase your annotation. If you want to turn off the webcam, you can turn off the
webcam option as well. And if you want it to hide the tools on the toolbox you
could click X on that. When you're done recording your video you can go back up
to the Screencastify icon. Click it. Hit stop. It's gonna pop up your video. I
recommend that you watch it before you push it out to students. It'll give you a
couple of choices about how you can save it. You can save it to your disc. You can
click the share button, and that will allow you to either share it on YouTube
directly or Google Drive. I do actually set up a YouTube channel for my students
so that they can just go there and find all my instructional videos. If you want
it to crop any part of the video, or trim the length you can do that here. There's
some editing functions as well that you can explore if you want to try some more
advanced functions. I think the easiest thing to do is to view your videos on
Google Drive. If you want to try something more advanced like creating
your own YouTube channel of course you could do that as well.
After a few minutes you can go back check to see if your file is ready
You'll see the video that you can then watch and the great thing is that this
file is now stored in your Google Drive and now you can go to Google classroom
and easily upload it so that students are able to view it. I'm going to go to the
class work tab, click "create material" "create a new assignment" called Google
Classroom Tutorial. As I showed you my Google Classroom tutorial I like to
create topics so that I can better organize my information for students. I'm
going to put this video in my instructional videos topic, then I'm going to hit the
Drive folder. You'll see that because I just created this video it actually pops
up right in my Drive as a recently created file. I'm going to click "Add Post,"
and now it's available for students to see. I hope you learned how easy it is to
create tutorial videos for students using Screencastify. If you have any
questions please ask in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching my
video. If you'd like to see more of my education technology tutorials hit that
red subscribe button. Below you can also find a
link to my website, as well as my Twitter handle, and my podcast, where I have
conversations with other educators about how they use technology in class, and
industry professionals about the latest and greatest in education technology.
Thanks again and have a great week!