Show notes
Screencastify or Loom? Trying to decide which of the two big dogs in classroom screencasting to use? Well, I've got your back. And not only do I have your back, but I have it in 4 formats: text, infographic, video, and podcast. Choose your flavor and get your learn on! If you decide to use one of them, check out my Screencastify and Loom tutorials! 🍦 Flavor 1: Infographic 🍦 Flavor 2: Podcast 🍦 Flavor 3: Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE2F3p_-qPg 🍦 Flavor 4: Text! Hi there, my name is Jake Miller. And I'm here in this YouTube video or podcast or blog post to talk to you about two of the most commonly used screencasting tools in education today and help you decide which one to use. Now, before we talk about those tools, I want to point out that I did say, I'm here in this YouTube video or podcast or blog posts, because this content is available in all three ways, so that you can get the information in the way that works best for you. So if you're in one tool, and you'd rather have it as a podcast, or a video or a blog post, that information will be in the show notes or the link or the descriptions or whatever it might be. So you could toggle over to one of those options to learn it in that format that works best for you. Okay, as I said, we're going to talk about two of the most common screencasting tools using education. First off, there's not only two tools out there, I've narrowed it down to the two tools that I think that educators with limited bandwidth for making these decisions should consider if you feel like you have the time to evaluate all of the tools out there and choose the one that's really best for you, by all means go for it. There are merits to the other tools that are out there. But I think if you really want to just look at just two tools, if that's all that you can really handle comparing right now, because you're busy with other stuff, these are the two tools you should you should consider. With that said, I think tools like Screencast-o-Matic have great features. I use a tool called Camtasia. It's just that it's not a free tool, so that's why I don't recommend that one here. I think the screen recorder in Flipgrid is pretty awesome. I know of teachers who use Nimbus and love Nimbus for this. And there are other options out there even other than the ones that I've mentioned there. But these are the two that I think are the best to consider if you really want to just narrow it down quickly and pick the one that works best for you. So again, we're going to be talking about Screencastify, which has been around for quite a while and I've been using for free for five or six years in education and recommending it to lots of educators. And then about a year or so ago, somebody said "I actually use Loom." Now, I had never considered Loom and I told them like "Yeah, whatever I'm sure Screencastify is just fine and better than Loom." But then I heard it from other educators and I started to wonder "Hmm, maybe I should check it out and see if it really is as good as Screencastify." And it turned out it was kind of like that situation where you have your favorite taco restaurant and you tell everybody about how great your taco restaurant is. And they tell you, Oh, do you check out the tacos at my favorite taco restaurant? And you're like, no way, no way there is good. But then you realize that it's possible for there to be two different good taco restaurants and then both to be completely valid, and you can eat it, both of them and enjoy both of them. So you go to that taco restaurant, you try out a taco, and you're like, there barbacoa tacos. Pretty good, right? And they're like, maybe I should start considering this one too. And you realize that there are two good options to consider here. Now, spoiler alert, I'm not going to tell you which one you should use. And I'm not going to tell you which one's the best because there is no answer to that to that question. There is, however, probably one that's best for you or best for your students or best for the content you teach or best for your school. So I'm going to help you prioritize what things you care about and what things they each have so that you can make an informed decision for you. So I'm over you're going to come out of this using screencastify. Somebody's going to come out of this using loom somebody We're gonna come out of a having switched from what you're used to us, some of you are going to come out of it and stick to using something totally different or decide on something totally different based on what you hear here. And that's okay. I just want to provide you with information to make those decisions. Last thing I want to say before we dive into this, if you are a teacher, there is a chance that your district has rules about which one you should use, they might relate to privacy or data privacy or safety or security. They might also relate to them just not wanting a multiple tools to be used on their platform. And that's fair for the district to make those kinds of decisions. So you may want to check with them and see if they care between these two tools. And if they don't, then you're free to decide which one works best for you. So let's compare these two tools on a Venn diagram. So I'm going to put screencastify on the left, and I'm going to put loom over on the right and we're going to look at what each of those tools offer and what they where they overlap to help you make that decision. Now, we're going to compare the educator free versions of both of these accounts. So screencastify has a free and a pro version. The Pro is fairly priced. If you start using screencastify a lot. It's worth considering it but we're going to consider just The free one here. loom has a free and a pro as well, but they give educators and students free access to the pro version on education account. So if your account ends with like at school dot o rG or.edu, you'll be able to verify that it's education account and they will give you free access. If you're on a Gmail account or something like that, you're probably not going to have free free access, and you're only going to have the free version. Now I'll try to point out where those differences are while we talk our way through this as well. Okay, getting right into it. One of the reasons that these are the two tools that you want to consider if you're only considering two is that they are both very easy to use by watching a 30 minute video or attending a 30 minute training or something like that, you could probably learn how to use either of them become proficient in them. And by the way, I have videos available for both of them, which I will link in here so that you can access them and watch them once you choose one. You could watch the one that fits for you and I'll stick them at the end as well. So you can find them there too, but they're both very easy to use. Okay. They both allow teachers to make an unlimited number of records. Which, especially if you're in a remote learning situation is incredibly important to be able to record as much as you want. Now, in the loom free version, you don't have unlimited recordings. But in the loom pro version, which is free to educators, as I said earlier, you do have an unlimited amount of video recordings. I think in the free version, it's 25 videos, but again, educators have lifetime free access to the pro version, and therefore have unlimited videos to record. Okay, next, let's talk about video limits. And this is the first reason that people might choose one over the other in screencastify free, your videos are limited to five minutes in length. You can have as many videos as you want, but they can only be five minutes long. For some educators. That's a deal breaker and if that's you, that's okay, that's your opinion. Other educators say you know what, I shouldn't have a video that's more than five minutes and if I do, I'll just split it up into two or three videos and that's fine too. It's really up to you what your opinion is. loom however, has unlimited recording length, no limit to the length of a loom video that's in the free version. It's just in the free version, you can only have 25 of those unlimited length videos. Whereas in the paid version, which is free for educators, you could have unlimited videos with unlimited length. So that's one definite point in looms favor there. That's why a lot of educators choose loom. Next, another one reason that people choose screencastify is that your screencastify files automatically saved to Google Drive. Or if you choose to turn that off, you could save them to your hard drive and download them automatically. People love the fact that it saves in our Google Drive, because that gives them easy access. And that also makes it really easy to share those videos and access them to put them in things like Google Slides and things like that. Another reason that educators and schools especially school administrators, love screencastify is if your videos are stored in Google Drive, they are not stored in screencastify. So screencastify does not house any of your video recordings. So it doesn't matter as much for a teacher video. But for a student video, it's comforting to know that your those students videos are not stored on screencastify site. They're stored in the students drive which is in their Google suite. domain, which is something that your school has already agreed to the privacy features and things like that with. So that is a bonus for a lot of situations loom however, the videos are stored on the loom site. Now that is nice though, because it is convenient to have them automatically go on the loom site where people can easily access those recordings. Okay. It is, however, a downside because that does mean that there's that little privacy and security piece where student videos potentially or student data potentially are out there on loom site. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it for that reason. I'm just saying it's something to keep in mind. Okay, the next thing that's really nice about both features is they both operate as a Chrome extension. So if you're using Google Chrome, both screencastify and loom will work right inside of Chrome. Now screencastify only works in Google Chrome. So if you're using Firefox or Microsoft Edge or something like that, screencastify is not an option for you. And you're probably not using them anyhow, because you're using a tool where the recordings automatically go into Google Drive. So you're probably not using it. But it's important to know it's only going to work in Google Chrome loom does not work in any other browser, at least not currently, you can play the videos in other browsers, but you can't record them in anything other than Google Chrome. However, loom does have a software version available. Okay, now that won't work on a Chromebook. But if you're using a Mac computer or a PC computer, you do have opposite access to the software version of loom, which does offer a lot more capability than the current a lot more but more capability than the Chrome extension does. That is a nice feature that you have there. Okay. Now surprisingly, this surprises me that loom has a software version available yet you have to be on the internet for that to work. That really seems odd to me. So loom only works when you're connected to the internet. screencastify, however, can record while you're offline, so you can access the extension record. And then as soon as you connect back to the internet, your recording will sync to your Google Drive. So there's a little bit of a situation in the middle there where you know, you're not exactly completely sure that your video is safe. But as soon as you connect to the internet, it'll upload I've never heard about it. Anybody saying they lost a video During that time, but it is a possible issue. But that's nice to know that you could record screencastify when you're in a situation without internet and then sync it up later loom that's just not an option, even with the software version, which really surprised me. Okay, some of the really nice things about screencastify it's really easy to insert your videos into Google Slides. That's because you can say add a video from Drive, click, there's your screencastify recordings, put them right in there, so super easy to put them in Google Slides. screencastify also has built in easy one click Options to send your video to YouTube to send your video to edpuzzle to send your video to Google Classroom to send your video to remind to send your video to Gmail to send your video to waitlet and they've said that they intend to add more in the future. Okay. Now both tools easily allow you to share a link to your video. It's a one click thing to get that link and have that link be ready to share with other viewers and have that link work for those other viewers. Both tools also very easily send your video via Gmail email, click a button. It's in the email. It's ready to be sent out easy with Both of those tools loom however, doesn't have those easy options for YouTube and edpuzzle and remind and Gmail and waitlet Google Classroom however, you could easily get those there with a multi step process right there's not a button to jump right over there. So for YouTube for example, you download the video from loom you go to YouTube, you upload the video to YouTube for edpuzzle you download the video from zoom, you go to edpuzzle you upload the video to edpuzzle it works it's not super inconvenient, but screencastify it's a little more convenient if you're judging the tools based on that factor though. I think I think that either tool is fine for you that's really splitting hairs to say those two things about the tools. Okay, so now let's look at export and download options. So screencastify added not too long ago, the ability to export your videos as gifts, so silent, looping image files that play like a video and then loop at the end and they can be any length you want. I believe you want to keep them relatively short if they're a gift, but it is possible in screencastify to record a screen recording And then download it as a gift that you can then put somewhere like in Google Slides to have it autoplay, that's not an option in loom, you can in loom, make the video and they use a different tool to turn it into a gift, but it's not a built in thing and loom screencastify also lets you export your your video as audio only. So you could record it as if it's a video, but then export just the audio and post it as a podcast or something like that. That's an option in screencastify. That's not there and loom However, in loom, you could certainly record the video and then use a different tool to rip that audio out of there, it would just be a little more complex than screencastify where it just says Download as mp3 and boom, you've got an audio file that you can post somewhere. Both of them export videos as mp4 video files, which is one of the most common video files out there. screencastify used to only do dot web m videos or web movie videos, which was problematic because it didn't work in all platforms. But they now do mp4 is as does loom so that's a really easily easy to access video format that you could use in other other locations. Okay, now while loom does offer al…
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