📺 Check this out in video form on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. 📺
Once upon a time, the market for screencasting on Chromebooks was a 1-app game – Screencastify. But later others came on the scene, Screencast-o-matic, Loom, Flipgrid, and way too many for me to list here.
Well, better late than never, Google has joined this party! I’m not sure what took them so long, but Google is adding a Screencast app, built into Chrome OS in M103. 🎉
It will let you record your entire screen or a portion of your screen along with your webcam and your voice. Like most screencast solutions, it also lets you annotate on the screen while recording. Up to that point, it’s pretty similar to the other Chromebook screencasting options. What sets Google’s native option apart are a few things.
First, the recordings are automatically stored in your Drive and, therefore, are easily shared with your colleagues and students. Likewise, it’s easy for your students to record things and submit them to you, plus it means student data is going to fewer servers since it’s staying within the Google ecosystem.
My favorite part, though, is the automated transcript created with your recording. 📝
It is auto-generated but you can edit the text as needed. The viewer sees that transcript alongside the video, they can use the transcript to jump to specific spots in the video, and they can even search the transcript for certain words.
You can also translate that transcript into any Google Translate-supported language. The UDL (Universal Design for Learning) here is off the charts. But, my favorite part, is that you can also edit out parts of the recording by clicking on parts of the transcript and clicking “skip.” That edits them right out of the video.
Now, the catch here is that’s as far as your editing can go. If you want to fine-tune your video and become a YouTuber, this is not the tool for you. But if you want a screencasting tool for your classroom this may be the right one for you.
I should note that the transcript is only there for viewers who are also using Chromebooks. You can share the video with a non-Chromebook user. They’ll be able to see the raw video, but it won’t include the transcript and it won’t skip any sections that you opted for to skip.
⭐ This tool is really only optimized for people recording on Chromebooks for viewers who will watch on Chromebooks, so keep that in mind.
📹 Here is Eric Curts’ video demo of the tool which does a great job showing what it can do. This feature, by the way, should be available in all Google accounts when using a Chromebook that’s on Version 103.
📺 Check this out in video form on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. 📺
[Video Source: https://youtu.be/hHyPcIHvlxo , Header Image Source: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/theanywhereschool-overview/]
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