Thursday, October 21, 2010

Screencastle - another screen casting site

A few days ago I reviewed Screenr, a webcasting/screen capture program that works in tandem with your Twitter account. While Screenr is easy to use, the lack of an email address is a problem for younger students or classes wanting to share a project.

Introducing ScreenCastle. This web-based program allows students to record a project (i.e. Slideshow with audio, a story, a news item, etc) and immediately make it available on the internet. ScreenCastle gives you a URL to view, as well as an embed code to put on a class website. (Using a DownLoadHelper, a Firefox plug in, you can even download it in avi format, but this is not a option provided by the site itself.)

Important: Make note of the URL generated.  Although no account or email is needed to do the recording and publishing (so easy!), students
must make a note of the URL that is generated (ie copy into a Word document) because there is no other way to find the uploaded video after the fact.

As I mentioned, you can also get embed codes too, but you need to get these at the time the video is uploaded, or there is no way to recover the code.

The sheer ease of use makes this an interesting web app to use in the classroom.