Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

A screencast is a slick way to demonstrate lessons or concepts to your students. You can use screencasts in online courses, sub plans, or for visual storytelling assignments. In this advanced age we live in, you can make lots of high-quality screencasts with free web applications. Below are Instructify’s top 5 screencast tools. All of them are free and easy to use.

1. ScreenToaster: ScreenToaster features great video quality, the ability to add captions, plus it lets you easily upload your video to YouTube, or download it in a variety of formats for viewing or editing later.
2. Screencast-O-Matic: This venerable screencast app recently added a lot of new features like uploading straight to YouTube, selecting between several screen-capture sizes, and exporting to different editable formats. The interface is slightly less intuitive than ScreenToaster’s, however, which bumps it down to number two.
3. ScreenCastle: You can’t get much simpler than pressing a big red button to start recording. Though it doesn’t let you edit, ScreenCastle is the ideal tool for people new to screencasting who don’t want to download anything or mess around with software settings.
4. Jing: Jing is a powerful program, but I ranked it lower than other apps because it requires a download (an admittedly capricious and arbitrary criterion). If you find yourself making lots of screencasts and don’t mind its glowing yellow orb a the top of your screen, however, Jing’s audio and video quality is on par with ScreenToaster’s.
5. CamStudio: Another solid program, CamStudio lets you export video files to editable formats. Getting the audio and video settings correct, however, can be frustrating, so expect a little trial and error as you get this program running.

Did we neglect your favorite screencast tool? Think we’re full of it? Let us know your favorite screencaster in the comments!