Learning to Screencast!

At first, I thought the exercise was that we had to upload a video to YouTube of ourselves! Thankfully after further reading of the assignment I discovered that was not the case.  

The first thing I had to do was to download a software called screencast to my computer. This application allows one to record what they’re doing on their computer screen. It took around 5 minutes to download the software to my laptop. Once the application had downloaded a small rectangular box appeared on my screen with a red circle to begin my recording in the bottom left corner. I pressed the red button to begin recording and then I opened a new page on my browser. I then searched University College Dublin and clicked the Images option. We then had to upload the video to YouTube which I did by selecting the upload to YouTube button in the bottom right corner. This then brought me into YouTube where I could see my video had been posted to my account. I clicked the button that said edit video and then I proceeded to add music, a title and tags to my video! I finished by pressing upload video.  

I personally felt that this task was not as challenging as creating a google map from the last Digital Badge. However, I struggled when it came to add the music to my video as I did not know where to find it.  I can really see the benefits of this application and I am happy to be made aware of the screencast application. I was already very familiar with YouTube and how to search for videos, but I have never ventured into the uploading and editing video side of it. This exercise has showed me that it is not as difficult as I imagined it would be. 

I can see this being a useful tool for college as if a friend of mine is struggling with how to do something on her computer, I can record how to do it and send it on. This exercise has also showed me how easy it is to upload and edit a YouTube video and I plan on doing more research on editing videos as it has become such a popular median today.   

At the start of this exercise I was unsure of what screencast was and how I was supposed to use it, so I google searched what it was. After reading a blog about it I was immediately interested and excited to use this tool! I was still a little unsure of how the editing of the video would go but I found it easy to create the video and upload it was no problem. I love how you can see the analytics of who views and likes your videos such as the age of the viewers and how long they spend on your page! I truly found the creative side to YouTube fascinating. I struggled with adding the music which made me quite frustrated, but I got there in the end. If I was to do it again, I would watch more YouTube videos on editing so that I could add text to my video.