Trying out Screencastify on my Chromebook

One of the good things about Google Plus is that people are always posting interesting, useful things. Today, I read about a really useful Chrome extension called Screencastify. I decided to check this out as a possibility for my students to record the analysis of their design work. We have played with Explain Everything on the iPads in the classroom (blog post here), but I wanted to check out Screencastify as I know they all have access to Chrome on their netbooks and chromebooks.

It was really easy to set up, as it just needed you to click a couple of things to grant access. You decide whether you want to save your work on the hard drive of your machine or your Google drive. Really easy.

I chose to save to my Google Drive. This then makes it simple to embed onto a Google site.
Here is my test that I made today.




Here is where I embedded it onto my sample Level 1 site ...

When we had a go in the lesson with Explain Everything, my students were very shy about the whole thing. Maybe if they have access at home to practicing their audio recordings of their work, they can have a better go as they won't feel the pressure of me wanting it from them within the lesson. They can start again as often as they like and no one will know.

I now need to make sure that structured help is available for them to access at all times, so they feel comfortable about what they are going to say.
This is a much more likely option for students to use out of the classroom as Explain Everything was good and has lots of other functionality, but it involves having a suitable device. I know that all my students have access to this option of Screencastify.
This will also be good for when I want them to talk though techniques that they are learning.