Making videos for educational purposes.

[dehro]

Hi all, I come to you with a problem my SO is facing.
She is a primary school teacher in Italy. The schools are closed and she had been uploading several tools and games on her website to keep the children busy and sharp on the content.
She has since last week been uploading a video a day on YouTube and linking it to her website.
The software/app she's been using so far too record those videos was screencast o Matic. Which she paid for.
It worked just fine until yesterday when some bug stopped her from being able to use it again. She's waiting on a reply from the customer service, but it isn't coming and she wants to keep uploading videos.

The question: do you know of another similar tool that allows her to record videos, share her screen whilst doing so, do some basic editing like adding text or similar..?
Preferably one that doesn't cost a ton and doesn't have a steep learning curve to use it.

[SerenaRaeyld]

Zoom.us is currently free and lets you share a screen as well as the video of your face (uncomfortable for me, but a price I'm willing to pay to give my kids that extra "face-to-face" touch). It doesn't include its own editing, unfortunately, but there's an option to optimize the videos for third-party-editing software (dig in the settings). You'd need a third-party-editing software, though.

I haven't personally used it, but I know a neighbor school is using screencastify.com, which is very similar to screencast-o-matic (I personally use and love screencast-o-matic). She might try that one. A lot of these softwares are lifting limits during the covid outbreak.

I'd also like to suggest she check out peardeck.com (works great for LIVE lessons with Zoom), and edpuzzle.com, if she'd like to do some interactive videos. Edpuzzle.com I believe can enable some very basic editing of videos recorded with screencast-o-matic or screencastify, but also allows you to embed multiple choice or free response questions at points within the video. Student accounts (verified sources of the info) require a lot of paperwork that's probably not pragmatic right now, but she could include a start-of-video "What's your name" short-answer question students could optionally answer to identify their responses published as a public video through edpuzzle.com.

Peardeck is a plugin for Google Slides (or Microsoft Office Powerpoint, but I strongly suggest the Google version; it has more features) that allows my students to log into a given link and access their own version of a slide-deck I create, with interactivity. So I can guide them through the slides, see everyone's work as they're working, including answering multiple choices, free response, or even drawing questions. There's a nice suite of EQ questions (I try to include one "taking their temperature emotionally" question each 1-3 day lesson), and I can display one or more student answers (annonymously) via Zoom to point out good things or suggest revisions. So far, my students mostly love it. If the session is set to "student-paced," then I can leave it open for students to work on outside of class. Finally, "takeaways" can be published at the end, which sends each student their own personal copy of the Google slides deck, as their recorded "notes" from class. It also partly integrates with Google Classroom.

Let me know if you (or rather she) has any other questions. I'm currently serving (unexpectedly) as our edtech person through this time. I'm personally working with secondary, but helping our elementary as well. :)

Good luck, and thank your wife on my behalf for her service, courage, and willingness to try new and unfamiliar things to continue to serve her children!

[Excession]

The question: do you know of another similar tool that allows her to record videos, share her screen whilst doing so, do some basic editing like adding text or similar..?
Preferably one that doesn't cost a ton and doesn't have a steep learning curve to use it.

I believe OBS is popular for game recording and streaming, which is roughly the same thing. It's free and open source. I haven't had need of it myself though, though being popular I assume there will be some tutorial videos around.

I don't know if it does much in the way of editing. A search for "open source video editor" might find something to fill that need.

[dehro]

Thank you both, and sorry for the late reaction.
Answering SerenaRaeyld specifically,
... she ended up looking into a few of the options you suggested, but by the time she familiarised herself with some of them (she had considered zoom already but it didn't fit the purpose), the guys from screencast-o-matic came back to her and solved the issue she was having with it, so now she's back to using that, and yes, it seems to be the one that best does what she's looking for.