Five Things I Like About the New Chromebook Screencast Recorder

Last week Google introduced a new way to record screencasts on your Chromebook. You can watch my tutorial about how to use it right here or as embedded at the end of this blog post. After a week of using it, here are five things that I like about it and I think will be helpful to teachers and students going forward.  

Automatic Transcripts
All of the screencasts that you create with the Chrome OS screen recorder are automatically transcribed for you. Those transcripts are timestamped to make it easy to read through them and click to the corresponding section of your video. You can edit the transcripts to correct any errors. An example of an error that I always have to correct appears whenever I say my last name in a video. Byrne always appears as Burn in the automatically generated transcript.

Automatic Transcript Translation
When students view your video and its corresponding transcript they can choose to read the transcript in English or in another language of their choice. Jump to the 1:36 mark in this video to see how students can view translated transcripts of your screencast videos.

Autosave to Google Drive
As you would expect from a tool created by Google, all of the screencasts you create with the Chromebook screencast recorder are automatically saved in your Google Drive account. Like everything else in your Google Drive, you can quickly and easily share your videos with your students in Google Classroom.

Quick Launch
The Chrome OS screencast recorder launches faster than any of the browser-based screencasting tools that I've tried. This is probably due to the fact that the screencast recorder is part of the OS and not an external third-party service running in Chrome. You'll notice in my demo video that I didn't have select what I wanted to capture on my screen. That's different than every other screencasting tool I've used on Chromebooks. All of those other tools require you to specify if you want to record a tab, a window, or the whole screen before you start recording.

Drawing Tools
You'll notice that the Chrome OS screencast recorder doesn't have as many drawing options as some other screencasting tools. Initially, I was a little disappointed by that. But on further consideration, I realized that I don't actually use all of the drawing tools in those other screencasting tools anyway. And the limiting of drawing options probably helps to keep the Chrome OS screencast recorder running faster and smoother than if Google had tried to cram a bunch of features into the initial launch of the recorder.

Watch my video below to see how the new screencasting tool built into Chromebooks works.

Important! Update your Chromebook to the latest version of Chrome OS to access the new screencasting tool to record a screencast on your Chromebook. 

Three Ideas for Telling Stories With Pictures

This is an excerpt from this week's Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter. This week, subscribers to the newsletter received a PDF that outlined ten ideas and tools for telling stories with pictures. 

Create Picture Books
WriteReader is a good tool for elementary school students to use to create image-based stories. WriteReader has two distinguishing features that I always point out to new users. First, it provides space for teachers to give feedback to students directly under every word that they write. Second, WriteReader has a huge library of images, including some from popular programs like Sesame Street, that can be used for writing prompts. WriteReader does have a Google Classroom integration that makes it easy to get your students started creating picture-based stories. Watch this video to learn how to use WriteReader.



Create Talking Pictures
ChatterPix Kids is one of my favorite digital storytelling apps for elementary school students to use. The free app is available in an iPad form and in an Android form. To use the app students simply open it on their iPads or Android devices and then take a picture. Once they've taken a picture students draw a mouth on their pictures. With the mouth in place students then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. The recording is then added to the picture and saved as a video on the students' iPads or Android devices. Tutorials on how to use both versions of the app can be seen here.



Picture Yourself in Front of Any Landmark
There are many free tools for removing the background from any image that you own. Use these tools to quickly remove the background from an image of yourself. Once the background is removed you can take the image of yourself and layer it over a new background image. Canva has this as a built-in feature as does PowerPoint. The process in Canva is outlined in this video. The process of using PowerPoint to remove and replace image backgrounds is outlined in this video.

When You Give a Kid a Camera

Last year we gave our daughters (four and five years old) a couple of kid-friendly digital cameras. My daughters love taking pictures with their little cameras and take them on almost every hike, trip to the wildlife park, and just about every new place that we visit. 

My daughters little cameras store roughly 800 pictures before they have to be transferred to a computer or deleted. After a hike on Sunday their cameras were full and I had to transfer some pictures to my laptop so that they can take more pictures when we go to the zoo. 

It was while looking through the 800 pictures they took that it dawned on me that they value of their cameras for us as parents is to get some insight into how our kids view nature and what they think is interesting. Aside from pictures of fingers partially covering the lens and blurry shots of feet there were lots of pictures of rocks they found interesting, close-ups of flower petals, pictures of worms and bugs, and some pictures of our dogs. 

Now that their cameras have more storage space, we're off to the zoo. I can't wait to see the pictures they take there! More importantly, I can't wait to hear them talk about the pictures that they took and why they took them. I guess you could say we're starting to dive into the world of digital storytelling. 

A Quick and Easy Way to Make Your Own Wordle-like Game

A few months ago I published a video about how to make your own Wordle-style games. Since then Wordle craze has not shown any signs of slowing down (at least amongst my network of friends and colleagues). New DIY tools for making your own Wordle-style games seem to pop-up every week. The latest one that I've seen is also the easiest to use. 

Strive Math now offers Custom Wordle for making your own Wordle-style games. To make your game simply go to the site and enter the word that you want to use as the correct answer. Your word can be any length. 

Sharing your Custom Wordle game is just a matter of giving people the link to your game. There is not a requirement for you or for them to enter any personal information in order to play the game. And just like the real Wordle game, when people get the answer they can annoy their friends by posting their scores on social media. 

Applications for Education
The cynic in me says that this is a nice SEO ploy by Strive Math. That said, if you're looking for a way to create a custom Wordle-like game for your students to play, Custom Wordle by Strive Math could be the tool for you.

And if you've been around the edtech world long enough to remember when the original Wordle craze started, here are five Wordle word cloud tools. 

A Giraffe in Our House - More Fun With Augmented Reality

Tomorrow we're going to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. My daughters have been looking forward to it for weeks! The giraffes are what they are most excited to see. This morning my youngest daughter asked to see pictures of giraffes. What she really meant was that she wanted to see augmented reality giraffes in our house. She knew that was a possibility because of our little platypus exploration last winter. So we spent a little time looking at augmented reality giraffes this morning in anticipation of tomorrow's trip to the zoo.  

Here's a little video of a giraffe in our dining room. 

How to Create Videos of Augmented Reality Animals

To create the videos of augmented reality animals in my house I simply did a Google search for them on my Pixel 5 then chose the "view in your space" option to have the animals rendered in AR. Once the animals were rendered in AR I then just held down the record button that appears on the screen when viewing an AR object via Google mobile search. The video automatically saves to the phone and from there you can share it anywhere including YouTube and Instagram. 

The whole process of making a video with augmented reality videos might sound complicated, but it's not. I demonstrated the whole process in this short video. 

Applications for Education

I use the augmented reality animals in Google mobile search to feed my daughters' curiosities and interests in animals that they otherwise wouldn't see except in a zoon. For slightly older kids think making videos of augmented reality animals could be a fun way to have students record short videos about animals and explain how why they would or wouldn't do well outside of their natural environment. Students can also stitch together a series of the short videos to tell a story about the animals. For example, I can envision creating an entire story about the adventures of a giraffe wandering through my neighborhood.