Screencast-o-matic

You do great things in your classroom - and when you can't be there because you are sick, you have family obligations or you have to be out of the room because of a district wide training - you don't want your students to "lose" that day of instruction.  Why not create a screen cast and have the substitute teacher just play your video to the students?

Or maybe your students have created a great project and they want to share it with the rest of the class, school, district or world.  You could have them create a quick screen cast and upload it to your class webpage for everyone else to view!

I have done both of these things in my classroom.  I have tried different software and web 2.0 tools - but the one I found that works the best (for free) is screencast-o-matic!  This web 2.0 tool allows you to record your screen, voice and video from your webcam for up to 15 minutes for free.  When finished you have options of saving the video file to screencast-o-matic, YouTube or to your own computer.  

Here is a 9 minute tutorial on how to use screencast-o-matic:

A few other things:

• You can create an account and login so that when you are done with your video you can save it right to their website.  This also allows you to store your screen casts all in one place.
• Go Pro! - for $15 a year you can add many features to your account.  Highlights include no watermark, editing features, draw and zoom, screen shots and publishing to Google Drive.