Ed Tech Review: Screencastify

What is it?

Screencastify is a popular screen recording software that is widely used for creating instructional videos, presentations, and tutorials. I spent an hour playing around with the tech to better understand how user-friendly it is, and how I’d potentially use it in my future classroom.

*it’s important to note that I have never screen-recorded with anything other than my iPhone, and so I’m starting off very novice.

Educational opportunities with Screencastify: Student use: With my experience working in middle schools, I think this would be a great tool for students to be able to use for school projects. This software would get more students ‘buying in’ to projects. Students are always wanting to use more tech in the classroom and have likely seen a lot of screen-recorded videos on YouTube and Tik Tok, so using this program could be really exciting for them. Screencastify could be used as an alternative to creating a PowerPoint, or a paper document.

Staff use: This would be helpful for creating educational videos on “how-to’s” for your class. Screencastify works for online learning, as well as in class, and be used as a tool year after year.

Things I disliked: Personally Screencastify is known to be fairly user-friendly, but for someone, whos not very ‘tech-savvy,’ it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. I found that when using the interactive aspect of the software I was having a hard time knowing what text boxes were important to fill in since there were many options and I hadn’t seen them used before. ask I was going through the program I had a lot of questions and kept needing to rely on my peers around me to bring me back on track. Once I had generally figured out how to put up an interactive question in my video, I then had to resize the text box to fit all the words of the questions. What I was not aware of was that after fitting all my words in the text box on the video, I also needed to leave space for a button which I was not able to see yet. Honestly, I wish it was a little more of a visual component, like a preview button that I would be able to click and see what changes I had made.

Things I liked: I like that I was able to edit, trim and upload my video right on the website easily. In total, it took me around 5 minutes to screencast and upload my video (without interactive parts) which was great, when you are in a time crunch. If I was just doing a basic screencast then it would have been very straightforward and easy to teach others.

Conclusion: Overall, Screencastify is a great choice for those looking for a simple and easy-to-use screen recording software for creating educational videos, as well as getting tech into students’ hands.