Screen Casts

Screen casts are one of my new favorite tools! When a colleague had a question on how to work something, I explained to her how but ultimately we decided to create a video to share with the staff on how to do it, so that they knew how to do it. That wasn't a screen cast but I have created 8-10 screen cast in the last month and this is what I have learned.

I used Screen Castify and Screencast-O-Matic. The two are both free to start with. Screen Castify allows you to create videos up to 5 minutes without any fee and it does not need to be downloaded to your computer, simply added to Chrome. Screencast-O-Matic must be downloaded to your computer and will create up to 15 minute videos for free.

Both will create great screen casts that get the job done. However, when I first started working on screen casts I was a t work. This only allowed for me to use Screen Castify because I couldn't download  Screencast-O-Matic to my work computer.

Screencast-O-Matic shows you the amount of time you have been recording for in the lower left hand corner of the screen with the pause button. This feature helped me to see when I was approaching the end of my time. On Screen Castify it did not show me a clock on my recording time and on one video I was cut off at the 5 minutes without finishing. All in all, the only difference that seems to mater in this case is how long you need the video to be. You are limited to 5 minutes with Screen Castify but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you are creating a screen cast it is most likely for a very specific task or instruction. In this case if it a resource you are trying to put out for others you don't want it to be more than 5 minutes because they are not as likely to watch it.

Ultimately, my favorite is Screen Castify because it suits my needs but I have nothing bad to say about Screencast-O-Matic. The only problem I came up with was having to download it to a computer, which for most of us is not an option at work. Below is a screen cast I created through Screen Castify.

Here is my screen cast on accessing the digital catalog at my library.