Providing a video lesson is of growing importance for educators and students. It allows remedial education and learning outside the regular classroom time and space, while enhancing learning opportunities during the typical school day, as well as promoting student independence. It is also a great way to archive your best work to better manage time to allow more one-on-one instruction with students.ScreenFlow is the perfect solution for educators that would like to make screencast video tutorials, training videos, how-to lessons, explanations, and more for their students and colleagues. It is easy to use and has a lot of great features. I have tried other screen capture tools and they simply do not compare to the ease-of-use and the feature-rich options of ScreenFlow.
ScreenFlow gives you a lot of options and power, but doesn’t overwhelm you with buttons and such. Recording and editing are straightforward. The user interface is simple and looks good. Your finished product looks professional and takes little time. You can capture what’s on your monitor, from a camera or iSight, record external mics, or just your computer’s audio. What’s not to like?
Your finished product is
a QuickTime video that looks amazing and was made quickly. You can easily upload it to your blog, wiki, website, or wherever else you need to educate your students in the 24/7 mobile world.
With ScreenFlow you can do a fast screen recording. Immediately afterward you can crop and adjust the video elements of the screen, manipulate the audio or add narration, add screen annotations, add zoom and pan, add media like music, transitions, and so much more. You can even access ScreenFlow in your menu bar. It is a clean, simple, yet powerful program that should be installed on every educators MacBook.
The user interface reminds me of GarageBand and iMovie, but it my opinion, even easier to use. Still, like any application, you will need to experiment with a couple of screencasts to fully appreciate all it can do and master its features.
I really like this program! It is Lion OS X ready. It can capture what is on your screen at the same time as your video camera, microphone, and computer audio. It use algorithms to keep your resolution beautiful. There are lots of 2D and 3D transitions to use. You can freeze a frame to draw a viewer’s attention into what you are explaining. A few video editing effects are possible and a wide range of audio ducking and effects. There are also some very cool capabilities to edit mouse tracks after recording that I was unable to experiment with, but they looked like great ways to enhance your screen capture. There were also plenty of tools to annotate directly on the screen by inserting writing or underling, boxing, circling areas of the screen. The screen could also be cropped. (There really is a lot going on here!)
Screenflow can also be used by students to create some incredible videos of work they have created on their computer.
I asked one of my students to take me on a Google trip to ancient Greece and record it using ScreenFlow. What a great product! I created some tutorials on how to set up our ePortfolios, and I plan to make a few videos for an ePub I am working on for some iTunes content. There is so much you can do with this software.
Grading: Wired Educator grades ScreenFlow = A+.
Comments: No word on educational discounts. Powerful and easy to use.
ScreenFlow is $99 and can be found on the App Store.
