Creating narrated screencasts

Screen recordings have been notoriously hard to do in Android. You had to tether your device to a PC or root it to do so.This, however, has changed since Android 5.0 Lollipop which supports screen recording natively and there is a number of great and easy to use apps to help you and your students create screencasts. The app that I use for recording is scr 5+ which come both in a free and a paid version.

Screencast can be used for a number of purposes in education:

• creating app demos (e.g. how to study vocab on Quizlet)
• narrated presentations using Google Slides or Powerpoint
• guided tours with Streetview or photospheres created by yourself
• recording a whiteboard explaination
• scribbling on a chart and explaining it and much more

Here are some tips on how to do screencasts:

Screencasts should be ideally short, somewhere between one to five minutes, as they get hard to listening to, particulary when not edited.

Some light editing can be done with the YouTube editor. Often all you need to do is trim the beginning and the ending of a video, which can be done easily with the YouTube editor. Other functions of you the YouTube editor you might want to use are increasing the audio volume and using free music in case you don’t want to do a voice narration.

Scripting a screencast before recording it might be a good idea, particularly if you want to avoid

slips. One of the avantages of creating a script is, that you can reuse it later for creating the captions. 

I use the YouTube editor also to add a podcast title sequence and closed captions. See also this previous post here.