Screencastify vs Camtasia: Which is a better fit?

Sarah M.: Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm a K-12 instructional technologist for a public school district. I would give Screencastify five stars out of five. And if you'd like more information and more reviews, click the link below. Prior to using Screencastify. We had a lot of teachers using other screencasting software, Screencast-O-Matic, Loom, some other different software tools. And overall, when we went through our last year with COVID and virtual learning and hybrid learning, we really wanted to find a tool that was reliable for teachers to be able to create their screencast and share those with students and we found that Screencastify was the best choice for our teachers in our district. Screencastify was very user-friendly for both our teachers and our students for creating screencasts from either at school or from home. We found that it was easy to be able to edit the videos, to be able to upload them, share them through Drive, Google Classroom, wherever we needed to. We noticed that there were some changes with the free and the premium version of Screencastify and so personally, I recommended that we upgrade to the premium tools of Screencastify, just so we could have access to all of the amazing editing options within the software. So with Screencastify, as a technology team, we created some tutorials just to get started, letting them know that they could use it from their desktop, but also use it as an extension within their Chrome browser. Teachers easily signed up for their accounts, logged in with Google. They loved being able to have access to all of their videos in one place. The fact that they save right within Drive and so just with a little bit of practice, teachers found it very easy to be able to implement and use. So for any teachers or school districts that are currently working with students who are virtual or quarantined, we found that Screencastify really was the best method to be able to record lessons in the classroom, even if you have in-person students and face-to-face classes currently. And then we would be able to post the link and share that so that students would always have access to the lectures going on, so they're not missing out on what's going on in the classroom. So we would highly recommend checking out Screencastify if you haven't already.

Jonathan L.: Hi, I'm Jonathan from Love Experience, and I'm an experience strategist. I think I rate Camtasia five out of five. I used to create training courses using a mix of different tools on my Mac, mainly QuickTime for trying to record the screen and then threading all those captures together in iMovie. It was kind of assembling multiple parts, and overall the screen capture was pretty poor quality. When I was looking for a tool to create the training courses, I really needed a combination of a powerful screen capturing tool, but one that could also capture the webcam and have really good control over the microphone because obviously voice quality and training is really important, and I went through a number of different video programs and Camtasia is the only one, which kind of did really brilliant screen capture, allowed you to select the separate kind of audio imports and didn't require a technical degree in video capturing to do so. When I started using Camtasia and made that kind of switch from the combination of products I was using before, there was quite a lot of tutorials provided by the company and they were pretty practical to run through. And the actual ability to do the capturing is really simple, how you can select the particular screen. I got multiple screens in my setup. I could select the audio interface, I could see kind of what was going on and then all of that capture on the timeline. Initially it looked kind of a bit difficult, especially I wanted to do some kind of alpha masking and things that possibly more advanced. But there was a really great amount of short videos. I don't have the time to go and read a thousand-page PDF or attend lots of live training. There was these really nice short videos that allowed me to learn how to do that manipulation, get it applied to my course, and basically get onto exporting it and get it up onto the various training platforms that I use. When you're looking at setting up Camtasia and starting to use it within your business, I think a really great investment to make alongside the software is a professional quality microphone. Whether that's using a separate kind of plugin USB audio processor or one that just plugs in direct to USB. In Camtasia, you can select the input. You don't need to mess around with any other audio software. It's all dealt with on the timeline. If it's a single mono input, you can just mix it down. It allows you to manipulate the sound. All of that kind of detail is what changes it from looking like a low quality webinar to a more high quality done at home studio production. And I think there's a few really simple things like for many people be recording this in the home office. I think putting some strategic pillows in the corner rooms to reduce the reverb, all those small things that really add up to a much higher quality finished product using Camtasia.