Screencastify

This year the district purchased Screencastify for all staff and students. Screencastify is a Chrome extension that will appear in your extension gallery in the top-right corner of your Chrome browser screen (see image to the right-->).

Screencastify makes it easy to record, edit, and share videos of your computer screen. Recordings can easily be shared via email, embedding code, YouTube, Google Classroom, and more. Once videos are recorded, they will automatically save to your Google Drive. You can also choose to upload the video to YouTube or Edpuzzle if you wish. The premium version of Screencastify also includes an editor that allows you to edit the video you recorded, but also any video in your Google Drive, whether or not it was recorded in Screencastify or another program.

Making Videos for Students

There is a difference in hosted videos and videos you store and push out from your Google Drive. YouTube hosts videos and streams them out bit by bit. It senses slow connections and reduces quality to make the playback experience better. It can reduce a video quite a bit for really slow connections. When we host our own MP4 videos from our Google Drive, it just dumps the entire video at once and the end user (with a slow connection) will spin or time out. Compounded with that, Chromebooks have crappy video graphics and don't have a lot of RAM to help out with the process, so they go belly up.

What can we do to make this better? Take a look at the size you record your video in - hopefully no one uses 4K! This is adjustable in Screencastify (which is the platform you all should be using to record). We should endeavor to keep our videos as small as possible and you do that by changing the resolution rate. I believe most of you are videoing in 1080p which is 1920x1080 and that is too high. I would use 480p (848x480) for most videos. If you have a very short video you might try 720 (1280x720), but that is pretty high for a Chromebook.

To change the size in Screencastify, click the extension, then click the Gear (Settings), then click Limit Resolution and change it to 480p. Zoom doesn't allow you to change the resolution except to increase it to "HD."

Another way we can help is to create smaller videos. Sometimes that may mean we need to create two or three videos instead of one longer one. Here are some things to think about regarding size -

• 1080p - one minute of video is 20MB of space, for a 30 minute video that is over a half GIG (600MB) - never record in 1080p for student videos

• 720p - one minute of video is 5MB of space, for a 30 minute video that is 150MB of space

• 480p - one minute of video is 2MB of space, for a 30 minute video that is 60MB of space

• 1080p is good for televisions or very large monitors. It is considered HD

• 720p is good for monitors or better laptops, this would be considered high resolution for a Chromebook, but not for a TV or large monitor

• 420p is good or tablets and Chromebooks, this would be considered normal resolution for a Chromebook

My personal rule of thumb:

When recording videos for staff, who have higher end laptops, I record in 720p. When recording for students, who have Chromebooks, I record in 480p. I never record in Zoom, but use Screencastify or a higher-end video platform like Camtasia or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Screencastify Updates

Screencastify has added some new features!

• New recording toolbar - which includes the ability to move it anywhere on the screen and adds stickers, shapes, and tools.

• Blur tool - blur anything on the screen with just one click.

• Title Clips - add title cards to the beginning of the video as an introduction, or in the middle to break the content into sections.

New features coming soon:

• Viewer analytics - see who has watched your videos

• Watch page - a new way to watch videos that is lightning fast