Intro in this video tutorial I’m going to show you a tool a free tool that anyone can access online that you can use to create your own screen recordings or videos similar to the ones that I make for my YouTube channel so let’s get started the name of the website and the name of the tool is screencast-o-matic and you can look up here at the top of the screen you can see that the URL the address for it is kind of tricky screencast-o-matic com but if you ever forget that all you really have to do is just go up here to the URL and type in screencast-o-matic all one word and it will find it and you can click to get started now one of the things I really like about screencast-o-matic especially when I’m showing other people how to use it is that it doesn’t really require you to sign up for login and password now it really does help I do recommend that you sign up and have an account but if you really don’t want to you can at least get started without having an account so I’m not going to sign in at this time as you can see here screencast-o-matic provides fast free screen recording and to get started all you have to do is click start recording now chances are Start Recording you’re going to get some popups like this one and some of this depends on the browser you’re using and the type of computer maybe that you’re using but what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to accept or launch or anything that’s in the affirmative you want to say yes I’m going to do that so I clicked launch and it is launching the recorder now you have to be patient especially the first time you do this and you might need to click allow and things like that once you’re set notice if you have a microphone it will start to detect your voice you can see it says it’s using the default microphone and so forth and you’ll notice that there’s options for webcam screencast or both in this case I want to do a screencast so I’m just going to click on that now like I said before I need to revisit this briefly depending on the browser you chose you may have gotten some pop-ups across the top of the screen or across the bottom and you need to click to allow screencast-o-matic to launch this tool if you don’t allow it you won’t get very far with screencast-o-matic I’m in Google Chrome so that’s the version that you’re seeing as you watch this video so if I wanted to record my screen using screencast-o-matic at this point what I would do after deciding if I want to record the webcam the screen or both I would go down and choose some of these options you’ll notice that the maximum time that you can record using screencast-o-matic is 15 minutes per video now if you really need more than that first of all maybe you should reconsider a lot of times shorter videos are better I know I’m one to talk a lot of my videos are longer than fifteen minutes but it doesn’t hurt to keep your videos nice and short so that’s one thing the other thing is you could always make video 1 video 2 video 3 keep them separate but kind of link them together so if you really need more than 15 minutes you can click to upgrade to a pro account and you can pay for a subscription underneath that where it says max time it says sighs I can click to change the size of the window okay so I just went from 480p to 7 20 P and you’ll notice that these dashed lines changed they adjusted themselves to match the dimensions the size that I had chosen well I’m going to switch yet again and go to fullscreen now it’s just going to record everything and here where it says narration I can click on the arrow and it will detect the microphones that I have available I’m going to stick just with the built-in microphone this time but I could easily switch to another microphone if I wanted to there’s also preferences if you click on preferences it shows you a hotkey a webcam hotkey control bar all sorts of things like that I’m going to leave those all at the defaults all right so I’m ready to record at this point and let’s say I want to show my students or maybe colleagues or parents how to use a website let’s say an educational website like this one abc.com all I would have to do to show them this is click record so I click the record button it gives me a countdown and then I can just start talking and describing it and showing the students or parents or whomever how to use this ok I could say ok go to second grade and it loads up games and activities for second grader there’s letters games and numbers games holidays all sorts of things okay so I could show them this and it’s recording everything I do everything I say it’s recording what’s happening on the screen so this is all being captured and it’s going to look really pretty good when I’m done I can go to holiday I’m recording this on December 20th and so you can see there’s a lot of appropriate holiday themed activities but anyway my point is all of this is being recorded you can also record things that are not in a browser window Other Recording Options even though screencast-o-matic came from my Chrome browser and again you can use it on whatever browser you have as far as I know but even though it originated there look I can just minimize Chrome and I can record my desktop and anything that I do with my desktop any application like this is PowerPoint and this is just PowerPoint on my computer it’s not a web-based PowerPoint but this is being recorded as well by screencast-o-matic when I’m done with my recording look in the lower left corner there’s a pause button I can just click that pause button if I need to I can catch my breath and I can click record again and that would continue the recording where I left off so if you really need some breaks now and then to compose your thoughts you can use that record pause record pause if you don’t like what you’ve recorded you can just delete and start over but if you’re pretty happy with it just click done and it will open up in screencast-o-matic at this point you get to decide what to do with your recording now there are definitely some things to think about here so let’s take a look at the options that you have first you can preview what it is that you’ve recorded just by pressing the play button describing and showing the students or parents remember and if I want to skip ahead notice I can just click here on the playhead and take it to the point where I want to take it okay so if I click play here you can see that it recorded my desktop okay so you can see that it recorded both the website and my desktop so this preview button is pretty important it plays what you’ve recorded and it gives you a chance to decide yes that’s good I want to keep it or no I do it over the other options that you have here are pretty important as well you have a couple of handles one here at the left and one at the right and what they do is they allow you to chop out the beginning of the video and/or the end of the video so this would remove the first few seconds and the last few seconds of my video and you can determine exactly how far to delete if you want to delete now I wish there were a way to cut out the middle of the video to trim out mistakes that you’ve made and things like that unfortunately there’s not really tools for that at least not in the free version I believe if you pay for the upgraded version that you may get those options but I’m not 100% sure okay once you’ve decided what to chop and what to keep your next decision is what to do with the recording do you want to save it on your computer if so you don’t even need to sign into your account you can just click save as video file and it will save it to your computer I believe it saves it as an mp4 so that’s a nice option you can also upload it to screencast-o-matic now if you do this the nice thing about it is yes you’ll have to sign up for an account through screencast-o-matic but they give you some free storage space and you can store your videos there and from that point you can make decisions about eventually maybe you want to download a copy of it because you saved it to screencast-o-matic you can go get the video you can save it to your computer also you could decide to upload it to YouTube okay if you have uploaded to screencast-o-matic it’s in your account and you can choose to do these other things later so this is typically what I do I choose upload to screencast-o-matic there are a couple of other options you can see you can redo it just deletes and allows you to start over you can cancel it’s pretty similar and you can also go here to the upper right and add more publishing options you can see there’s Vimeo Dropbox and Google Drive but those are pro only so we don’t really need to look at those in this session so I’m going to choose upload the screencast-o-matic and at this point I would need to sign in to my account once I’m signed in it will know what my account is it will title it and if you want to change that title you can click and give it a new title you could put in a description channel all of these different things you could try password protecting your upload there’s some different options that you have even a cursor highlight or no cursor or highlight cursor okay captions if you want you can try adding captions there’s quite a lot of really good options that you have here to explore when you’re done click publish and it’s going to start publishing and uploading this to screencast-o-matic okay great so I am logged in now to the website screencast-o-matic comm in the upper right corner I just clicked log in and I signed into my account and now if I click your account it takes me to a page where I can see past recordings and my other screencast is still uploading so I’m just going to go to one that I uploaded in the past by clicking on this video that I made I can then go here where it says manage screencast link embed and you can see it gives me an embed code so I could put this onto my blog or website it gives me a link but it also has a button that allows me to download an mp4 copy of this video so you can see it is pretty nice to upload your videos to screencast-o-matic because they’re in your account that way you won’t lose them and you’ll be able to link to them download them and even embed them so for those of you that want to get started making your own video tutorials or making videos that show students how to conjugate verbs or how to reduce fractions or you know you can make computer tutorials with screencast-o-matic but it’s also great for teaching different content areas and teaching your students procedures and all sorts of different things if you want to get started doing that at no cost screencast-o-matic really is the place to go it’s the tool to use to get started for free then if you decide you want more you can upgrade to something like ScreenFlow or Camtasia or a similar tool that costs quite a bit more thanks for watching this video tutorial I hope that you enjoy using screencast-o-matic and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video tutorial at least every Monday
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