Bring a personal touch to screencasting, lectures, and feedback.

Today I want to talk about one of the absolute crucial tools that I use in instruction with my students. It is the single piece that has completely revolutionized how I teach, how I give feedback, how I communicate. Literally every part of what I do with and for my students has been impacted by a product called Loom.

Loom is one of those companies that has made a critical mistake in that that whole piece of if you're really good at something, don't do it for free. Loom is completely free. A Loom Pro account with unlimited storage, 4K recording is completely free for educators for life.

The beautiful part about Loom is just how easy it makes the entire process and how easy they have made it to use across a plethora of different devices. There are native apps for Mac, for Windows, for your iPhone. There are also plugins for various browsers, so they really have just gone above and beyond just making it easy for you to put this into play.

So once you've signed in and installed the apps, all you have to do is click start recording. This will record whatever screen you want as well as show your webcam in the bottom corner. Loom will give you a countdown and will then start recording everything on your screen, along with your webcam video down in the corner.

On the side of the screen Loom has different tools you can use. There's a pen that you can write with. You can actually type on things.

So imagine you've got a student's paper in front of you and you're red marking it as you go. You've got Track Changes on, and you're kind of showing them your thought process, what you're doing. So not only do they see the fixed document at the end, but they hear you talking it through. It's like a one-on-one coaching session. Another cool part about it is that the minute I finish recording, I am immediately taken to the webpage of my video and this link has already been copied onto my clipboard. So all I have to do is paste the link!

So whatever student management system you're using, whatever program you're using, Google Classroom, Edutopia, whatever it is, you can immediately just paste the link there, and the student can watch it immediately. Just the sheer amount of time that this saves, and if you think about how much can you type in two minutes and how much feedback can you talk in five minutes, whatever that looks like.

It's that personal touch, it's seeing your face, it's hearing your voice, hearing that inflection. This piece simply, it's just revolutionary of what it can do, so I really, really hope you'll check it out. I hope that you can see as we move into this idea of 21^st century education, this isn't just a piece for remote instruction. This is something that can revolutionize how you communicate with your stakeholders, those weekly newsletters, emails home, feedback on assignments, all of those pieces. That personal touch and in-depth feedback.

I really, really hope that you'll explore using Loom.