Screencast from Techsmith
I mentioned Screencast in a recent post about another of Techsmith’s offerings; Jing. Screencast is a free service with 2GB of storage and the same in bandwidth usage p/m. Like many online services there is an option to upgrade to a Pro account which greatly increases these allowances. But, at least to start with, you’ll be fine with the free version.
I think Screencast comes into its own when combined with Jing. Being able to rapidly and easily record a video of what’s happening on your screen and upload it with one button to your Screencast account is very very useful. From there you just need to distribute the video which you can do by emailing the URL to whomever, linking to it from a website or embedding the HTML, which is generated by Screencast, into a webpage or VLE course area.
However, Screencast is not just limited to Jing. You can upload other media files into it which presents, at least a temporary and low-level but immediate, solution to the problem of storage. Where to put files is the big problem that our staff encounter with online video. We usually suggest YouTube but some staff have issues with the public availability; which is reasonable. Screencast movies are, by the very nature of their being available to share, technically public but do not have the massive search engine of Google indexing their location.
Screencast also provides a few other functions:
- Customized Templates
- Desktop Uploader
- RSS Feeds so your users can subscribe to your media
- MediaRoll widget for blogs