🎅 On the twelfth day of Christmas, ScreenPal gave to me…🎄
Yes, I know it is exactly 12 days before Christmas. Or maybe the “twelfth day of Christmas” is actually on January 5th?
Regardless of the actual date, in the spirit of the holidays and giving, we wanted to share a crowd-sourced article with 12 of our favorite ScreenPal features. We reached out to ScreenPals- both on our team and experts in the field- for an explanation of their favorite ScreenPal tool.
Stuff your stocking with one of these fun ideas to streamline video capture, creation, and sharing!
In case you want to jump ahead to any of the featured features (see what I did there?), here’s a quick reference:
- Stories tool
- Speech-to-text closed captions
- Zoom in on the Video Editor timeline
- Download videos as GIFs
- Advanced editing features
- Intuitive user experience
- Engaging assessments
- Highlight and add zoom
- Chrome extension
- Video hosting
- Sharing options
- Automatically detect and remove silences
Stories tool
“One of my favorite ScreenPal features is Story. Traditionally, when one wants to create a video, they first design it all on a storyboard, either on paper or with a software tool. Then they use a different software tool to actually create their video. ScreenPal allows you to design your storyboard inside the same software application that you use to actually create your video. How convenient!”
- Boyd Edmondson, Senior Java Desktop Application Developer, ScreenPal
Speech-to-text closed captions
“My favorite ScreenPal feature is the speech-to-text captions feature. I can create closed captions and export the caption .txt file in order to create a transcript. This makes our videos more accessible and available to all students.”
- Kelly Rawlston, Education Program Consultant II, Technology Services and Digital Learning, NC Department of Public Instruction
Zoom in on the Video Editor timeline
“One of my favorite (and lesser known) things about the ScreenPal Video Editor is that you can zoom in on the timeline. Using the zoom feature is especially helpful when you have a long video with lots of overlays and transitions. You just click the little magnifying glass icon next to the timeline, adjust your zoom level, and you can more precisely add shapes, arrows, sound effects, cuts, and so forth. I use it all the time!”
- Christin Toler, Technical Writer, ScreenPal
Download videos as GIFs
“ScreenPal, the superhero of online screen capture tools, swoops into the K-12 classroom with a game-changing feature: the ability to turn videos into GIFs faster than a student can say, ‘Is it time for recess?’
Picture this: a vocabulary lesson where students unleash their creative genius, crafting GIFs that bring word meanings to life: imagine a jubilant dance party for ‘ecstatic’ or a stealthy cat for ‘furtive.’ ScreenPal turns language learning into a hilarious guessing game.
But that’s not all! In the science corner, students can use ScreenPal to showcase mind-boggling phenomena and explain concepts with GIF magic. Want students to show what they know? Have them demonstrate how to calculate the area of a triangle or create a time-lapse GIF illustrating the life cycle of a plant.
And for our time-strapped teachers, ScreenPal is the ultimate time-saving sidekick. No more repeating yourself or stumbling through complicated instructions. Teachers can create quick GIF tutorials to instruct students; it’s like having a teaching assistant! ScreenPal transforms the K-12 classroom into an animated learning adventure, where even the most challenging subjects become as captivating as a Marvel movie.
Holy learning revolution, ScreenPal!”
- Stephanie DeMichele, Owner/Principal Consultant, TechKnow Teacher, LLC.
Advanced editing features
“ScreenPal is super cool because it enables me to move, resize, and even crop webcam, video, and image overlays throughout the timeline. This provides an animated and dynamic video. This helps keep viewers engaged, and only takes a couple clicks!”
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- Greg Frederick, Technical Support Engineer, ScreenPal
Intuitive user experience
“The advanced editing features make editing a video in ScreenPal incredibly easy because of the color-coding in a single timeline. Whether you choose to blur sensitive information, add numbered steps, or include overlays, the process is simple and straightforward, especially for new users or those without much editing experience.”
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- Destiny Wagner, Owner/Consultant, EdTech Nerds
Engaging assessments
“The advent of our quizzing feature and addition of LTI 1.3 integration enables users to create seamless assessments. After creating a video, you can upload it to ScreenPal’s hosting site, create a quiz, and assign directly through your learning management system.
I also love the results and analytics available with our Quiz feature. I can see a heat map summary, aggregated data, and individual data for my quiz to gather insight and improve instruction. This would help me pull small groups or individuals to personalize learning in my classroom. I can even provide immediate feedback for multiple choice and true/false questions and provide written feedback for short answer questions.”
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- Sarah Eiler, Community Engagement Coordinator, ScreenPal
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Highlight and add zoom
“I love using the highlight overlays and adding zoom in my instructional videos. If I’m working on a problem in my math class that I want my students to focus on, or my writing is a little bit small and I want them to be able to see it better, I will use the highlight and then the zoom feature. The highlight overlay tool allows me to draw a box around what I want highlighted, then I click ‘Add Zoom’ and expand as large as I want so that my students can really focus on that one problem and really see my handwriting well.”
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- Rachel Zonshine, 5th Grade Lead Learner, Thomas Edison Elementary School
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Chrome extension
“I use the Chrome extension for video messaging daily. When explaining an idea, documenting, or providing feedback, a quick recording in the communication thread is helpful for everyone. It’s also a much friendlier way to send a message than in a text!”
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- Kelly Jura, Vice President of Brand and User Experience, ScreenPal
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Video hosting
“My favorite ScreenPal feature is allowing for hosting videos on a custom domain you own. Being able to upload your videos to our server, but then provide access through your custom domain such as vids.mycoolsite.com, is really neat. This level of customization provides an awesome way to make your hosting environment unique to you!”
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- Logan Aikas, Software Engineer, ScreenPal
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Sharing options
“As a teacher and tech integration specialist, the easiest way for me to make my videos accessible to students, their parents and other teachers is to upload them directly to my YouTube channel. I so appreciate the ease and accessibility of being able to edit my how-to videos and touch one button to seamlessly upload them to my channel. I always also “work in the background” and save a video backup file to my hard drive, but the ability to so easily upload directly to YouTube is fantastic. I love it when things integrate with other things well. I also happen to sign in to my account using Google, so I guess the entire Google integration feature is awesome. There are so many amazing and easy-to-master features, but that one is the one I use nearly every time I make a video.”
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- Becky Harvey, Tech Integration Specialist/Digital Literacy Teacher, Quabbin Regional School District
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Automatically detect and remove silences
“ScreenPal includes so many time-saving features, but one of my favorite is automatic silence detection. You don’t have to do anything – if you have any kind of narration or voiceover in your video, ScreenPal will automatically detect silences of two seconds or more and highlight them for you. You can then choose to remove all of them, shorten all of them, or review them one by one to keep or delete as needed. It’s just one of the many ways ScreenPal streamlines your workflow and saves you time so you can focus on your message.”
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- Rebecca Young, Director of Growth Marketing, ScreenPal
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