The use of videos and screencasts in classroom instruction has become a lifeline for many teachers and students. User-friendly Loom lets you record your screen -- anything on your screen -- and share it quickly and easily with your students via a link or embed code. Record directions once for students learning from home or in the classroom, allowing them to rewatch multiple times if needed. Create short how-to videos, model exemplars of anything from poetry annotation to lab safety procedures, or send quick reminders home, adding calls to action to your videos as needed to direct viewers to additional resources or tasks.
For more in-depth lessons, use Loom with an extension like Kami to highlight and explain important points in documents or to give students formative feedback. Teachers can strike a balance between giving the fish and teaching to fish by providing students or colleagues with videos about assignments, LMS features, new tech tools, or changes in classroom procedures. Plus, the team feature makes it easy for colleagues to share the work of video creation. The personal touch of seeing a teacher's face not only serves to form better connections with students, colleagues, and families, but also saves loads of time and frustration.
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Take Classroom Video to the Next Level
Which Remote Learning Tools Will Teachers Bring Back In Person?Loom is a screen recording tool that lets users record audio, video, browser windows, or entire screens in a Chrome extension, desktop app, or mobile app. In terms of the different options, the Chrome extension can't show your camera bubble if you leave Chrome, the desktop app won't work on a Chromebook, and the mobile app won't allow simultaneous screen and camera recording. If teachers sign up for a free Loom for Education account and get verified, only one creator is allowed, so teachers do all of the recording. Students don't need an account. The other free account option allows for 50 creators, but with limits on the number of videos and their length. Plus, there are no classroom features, and students would need a Loom account.
The onboarding process is thorough and includes tutorials, feature walkthroughs, and examples. Once it's installed, users can click on the Loom icon and choose from the recording options: just their face, one tab, or the whole screen (with or without audio). A short countdown precedes recording, and users have unlimited time to record as many screencasts as they want. Once you stop the recording, a link will automatically save to your clipboard, allowing for seamless public or private sharing via email, social media, or embed code. The videos will also save to your personal library, giving you the option to edit, pin, and organize them into folders and subfolders. Teachers can also share them to a team library to make them easily accessible to colleagues. Editing features are limited to trimming, changing playback speed, adding a thumbnail, or including calls to action that include attached resources. Teachers can allow students to comment and download videos or not. Some teachers might wish for more, but for others, the simplicity and ease of use will be enough to satisfy basic classroom recording needs.
Opportunities to communicate, demonstrate, and model are nearly limitless, and teachers can take advantage of the ease of Loom to create and distribute videos quickly without the painstaking and time-consuming task of uploading them to Google Drive or YouTube. Being able to just share a link or embed the video without worrying about file organization and storage is great, and sharing videos with other teachers is super easy too. That ease enables teachers to create screencasts to use every year, like a FAQ come to life. Plus, not having to worry about student accounts is a huge advantage. The option to allow comments and attach additional resources makes this tool even more effective for classroom use.
Making it possible for students to create and share with the classroom version would add even more value, and more accessibility and integration options would also make it more seamless for teachers. As it stands, though, it's a simple and useful tool that can make more traditional presentations friendlier without a lot of hassle.
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