Photo Available on Pixabay CCO

When One Door Closes - Find a New Door

Two Great Alternatives to Snagit

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Earlier this month, TechSmith announced that it was ending support for most of its free educational programs, including SnagIt, which had been the easiest screencasting tool available for the Chromebook. It happens. TechSmith will make most of their programs available for the cost of a license (per student no doubt). So, let me be the first to declare it in no uncertain terms - SnagIt is DEAD TO ME. With resources tight and other options out there, I don't see any reason to pay TechSmith for this service - and I think this will hurt their overall educational market.

So, we move on. There are two other great options for screencasting on Chromebooks, and both of them have a few more features than that old program we used to use. CaptureCast and Screencastify are both free and available on the Chrome Web Store for your students to use. 

Screencastify is a free Chrome extension available on the Chrome Web Store. Once you've installed the extension, and given it access to your Google Drive Account, the Screencastify icon appears in your Chrome tool bar. Click it and you can record an active Chrome Tab, the entire internal display - great for recording a full screen presentation, or recording from your Chromebook's camera. If you are flipping your lessons, you might consider selecting the option to embed the webcam in the bottom-right corner of the screen. That way your students connect with you and not just your content.

One of the features I really like about Screencastify is that you can pause your screen recording and continue with the same recording later on, handy for transitions or breaks in the recording.

When you finish recording, you have the option of making the video a little more polished by trimming the beginning or ending. Also, assuming you checked this option when setting it up, your video will never be stored locally on your computer. It will automatically be saved to a Screencastify folder in "My Drive."

Here are two sets of directions on getting started with Screencastify. First, traditional written directions using Google Slides:

Secondly, video instructions posted on YouTube (I originally created this for a classroom of students, so you can share this with your classes if you want):

The one problem that I've encountered with ScreenCastify is that it doesn't work on older Chromebooks (like the original Samsungs) and it won't work if the students have saved a large number of files to their local storage on the Chromebook.

CaptureCast is new to me, but it works very much the same way. One of the differences between CaptureCast and Screencastify is that CaptureCast will allow you to link to either YouTube or Vimeo, if you prefer Vimeo. Here is the official getting started video for CaptureCast:

Both of these tools allow you to record your screen and use your webcam to record your face while you are presenting. That is a nice way to add a social presence to a flipped, blended, or personalized lesson.