Sceencasts: How in the world did they do that?

I have sat through 9 school years of professional developments. Some are in person trainings, while others are webcasts (live or recorded). The video trainings or live webcasts often feature videos of the trainers computer screen. These videos show step by step how to complete a specific task. I love these types of trainings. It is amazing to me to see the actual screen. I have always wondered how in the world to they do that?!?!

Today I learned that it is not as hard as I previous believed. First of all, the process is called a screencast. Just like it sounds, it is a podcast (audio recording) with the video of the actual screen. I love this!!! I have so many ideas for screencast that I can add to my school website. I can record lessons I am teaching my students, so they can go back and revisit any time they need to. Not to mention, instructional videos for the staff saved to our school wide shared drive. Like most of my previous posts, I looked at three different websites that give you the possibility to create screencasts.

Screenr

Very simply put...don't bother to go to the site.  It is no longer a working site.

Screencast o matic 

To use this website, you do have to set up an account.  It was simple to sign up.  An email verifying my email account was instantaneous.  The free account does have limits to the number of videos that you can create.  The website offers a Pro Recorder account for $15 per year or $29 for 3 years.  The free account offers 15 minutes of recording, screen and webcam recording, YouTube HD publishing and the ability to save as a video file.  There is also some downloading involved.  I quickly set up the account and downloaded the required items.  Screencasts were easy to create even for beginners.  

Click Start Recorder.  A box will appear for recording.  You can record a portion of the screen or the whole screen.  The site offers a sound bar that visually lets you see when sound is being picked up by the program.  Click the red "REC" button and you are recording.  I was able to save to my computer.  

Here is a seven minute video that I made for my students on how to use our school library database to search for books on our campus.  

I really like that the mouse has a yellow circle around it.  This makes it very easy to find on the screen.  Also when you click, there is a blue ripple or flash that indicates that the item was clicked on the screen.  

Jing

Jing is hosted by TechSmith.  I found this site much more cumbersome to navigate.  I did the free download and set up my account.  I then had to use there search bar to find Jing. It include step by step tutorial.  Once you have the program running, there will be a small yellow semicircle at the top of the screen.  When you want to screen shot or record screencast,  you do it from here.  Recording the video is pretty easy.  I did have to go into the settings and change the settings for the microphone.  I recorded 3 videos with no sound before I found the problem.  This site limits you to 5 minutes per recording.  It keeps a history of your screen shots and screencasts. They are saved to screencast.com, also part of TechSmith.  Screencast.com has a limit to the amount of bandwidth and storage as well.  I found it EXTREMELY frustrating to find out how to embed the videos.  I was unable to save the videos to my computer, only to screencast.com.  I am attempting to embed my instructions for making a comic here: 

How_to_make_a_comic_video_001 - Test

I recorded this on a larger computer monitor.  When I attempted to play it on a smaller monitor, it did not adjust to the screen.  

Obviously, it was hands down that Screen o matic is my favorite.  I will definitely continue to use it in the future.