EdTech Tool Comparison: Screencastify VS Loom

Screencastify or Loom? Trying to decide which of the two big dogs
in classroom screencasting to use? Well, I've got your back. And
not only do I have your back, but I have it in 4 formats: text,
infographic, video, and podcast. Choose your flavor and get your
learn on!


If you decide to use one of them, check out my Screencastify and
Loom tutorials!


Flavor 1: Infographic
Flavor 2: Podcast Flavor 3: Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE2F3p_-qPg
Flavor 4: Text!

Hi there, my name is Jake Miller. And I'm here in this YouTube
video or podcast or blog post to talk to you about two of the
most commonly used screencasting tools in education today and
help you decide which one to use. Now, before we talk about those
tools, I want to point out that I did say, I'm here in this
YouTube video or podcast or blog posts, because this content is
available in all three ways, so that you can get the information
in the way that works best for you. So if you're in one tool, and
you'd rather have it as a podcast, or a video or a blog post,
that information will be in the show notes or the link or the
descriptions or whatever it might be. So you could toggle over to
one of those options to learn it in that format that works best
for you.


Okay, as I said, we're going to talk about two of the most common
screencasting tools using education. First off, there's not only
two tools out there, I've narrowed it down to the two tools that
I think that educators with limited bandwidth for making these
decisions should consider if you feel like you have the time to
evaluate all of the tools out there and choose the one that's
really best for you, by all means go for it. There are merits to
the other tools that are out there. But I think if you really
want to just look at just two tools, if that's all that you can
really handle comparing right now, because you're busy with other
stuff, these are the two tools you should you should consider.
With that said, I think tools like Screencast-o-Matic have great
features. I use a tool called Camtasia. It's just that it's not a
free tool, so that's why I don't recommend that one here. I think
the screen recorder in Flipgrid is pretty awesome. I know of
teachers who use Nimbus and love Nimbus for this. And there are
other options out there even other than the ones that I've
mentioned there. But these are the two that I think are the best
to consider if you really want to just narrow it down quickly and
pick the one that works best for you.


So again, we're going to be talking about Screencastify, which
has been around for quite a while and I've been using for free
for five or six years in education and recommending it to lots of
educators. And then about a year or so ago, somebody said "I
actually use Loom." Now, I had never considered Loom and I told
them like "Yeah, whatever I'm sure Screencastify is just fine and
better than Loom." But then I heard it from other educators and I
started to wonder "Hmm, maybe I should check it out and see if it
really is as good as Screencastify." And it turned out it was
kind of like that situation where you have your favorite taco
restaurant and you tell everybody about how great your taco
restaurant is. And they tell you, Oh, do you check out the tacos
at my favorite taco restaurant? And you're like, no way, no way
there is good. But then you realize that it's possible for there
to be two different good taco restaurants and then both to be
completely valid, and you can eat it, both of them and enjoy both
of them. So you go to that taco restaurant, you try out a taco,
and you're like, there barbacoa tacos. Pretty good, right? And
they're like, maybe I should start considering this one too. And
you realize that there are two good options to consider here.
Now, spoiler alert, I'm not going to tell you which one you
should use. And I'm not going to tell you which one's the best
because there is no answer to that to that question. There is,
however, probably one that's best for you or best for your
students or best for the content you teach or best for your
school. So I'm going to help you prioritize what things you care
about and what things they each have so that you can make an
informed decision for you. So I'm over you're going to come out
of this using screencastify. Somebody's going to come out of this
using loom somebody We're gonna come out of a having switched
from what you're used to us, some of you are going to come out of
it and stick to using something totally different or decide on
something totally different based on what you hear here. And
that's okay. I just want to provide you with information to make
those decisions. Last thing I want to say before we dive into
this, if you are a teacher, there is a chance that your district
has rules about which one you should use, they might relate to
privacy or data privacy or safety or security. They might also
relate to them just not wanting a multiple tools to be used on
their platform. And that's fair for the district to make those
kinds of decisions. So you may want to check with them and see if
they care between these two tools. And if they don't, then you're
free to decide which one works best for you. So let's compare
these two tools on a Venn diagram. So I'm going to put
screencastify on the left, and I'm going to put loom over on the
right and we're going to look at what each of those tools offer
and what they where they overlap to help you make that decision.
Now, we're going to compare the educator free versions of both of
these accounts. So screencastify has a free and a pro version.
The Pro is fairly priced. If you start using screencastify a lot.
It's worth considering it but we're going to consider just The
free one here. loom has a free and a pro as well, but they give
educators and students free access to the pro version on
education account. So if your account ends with like at school
dot o rG or.edu, you'll be able to verify that it's education
account and they will give you free access. If you're on a Gmail
account or something like that, you're probably not going to have
free free access, and you're only going to have the free version.
Now I'll try to point out where those differences are while we
talk our way through this as well.


Okay, getting right into it. One of the reasons that these are
the two tools that you want to consider if you're only
considering two is that they are both very easy to use by
watching a 30 minute video or attending a 30 minute training or
something like that, you could probably learn how to use either
of them become proficient in them. And by the way, I have videos
available for both of them, which I will link in here so that you
can access them and watch them once you choose one. You could
watch the one that fits for you and I'll stick them at the end as
well. So you can find them there too, but they're both very easy
to use. Okay. They both allow teachers to make an unlimited
number of records. Which, especially if you're in a remote
learning situation is incredibly important to be able to record
as much as you want. Now, in the loom free version, you don't
have unlimited recordings. But in the loom pro version, which is
free to educators, as I said earlier, you do have an unlimited
amount of video recordings. I think in the free version, it's 25
videos, but again, educators have lifetime free access to the pro
version, and therefore have unlimited videos to record. Okay,
next, let's talk about video limits. And this is the first reason
that people might choose one over the other in screencastify
free, your videos are limited to five minutes in length. You can
have as many videos as you want, but they can only be five
minutes long. For some educators. That's a deal breaker and if
that's you, that's okay, that's your opinion. Other educators say
you know what, I shouldn't have a video that's more than five
minutes and if I do, I'll just split it up into two or three
videos and that's fine too. It's really up to you what your
opinion is. loom however, has unlimited recording length, no
limit to the length of a loom video that's in the free version.
It's just in the free version, you can only have 25 of those
unlimited length videos. Whereas in the paid version, which is
free for educators, you could have unlimited videos with
unlimited length. So that's one definite point in looms favor
there. That's why a lot of educators choose loom. Next, another
one reason that people choose screencastify is that your
screencastify files automatically saved to Google Drive. Or if
you choose to turn that off, you could save them to your hard
drive and download them automatically. People love the fact that
it saves in our Google Drive, because that gives them easy
access. And that also makes it really easy to share those videos
and access them to put them in things like Google Slides and
things like that. Another reason that educators and schools
especially school administrators, love screencastify is if your
videos are stored in Google Drive, they are not stored in
screencastify. So screencastify does not house any of your video
recordings. So it doesn't matter as much for a teacher video. But
for a student video, it's comforting to know that your those
students videos are not stored on screencastify site. They're
stored in the students drive which is in their Google suite.
domain, which is something that your school has already agreed to
the privacy features and things like that with. So that is a
bonus for a lot of situations loom however, the videos are stored
on the loom site. Now that is nice though, because it is
convenient to have them automatically go on the loom site where
people can easily access those recordings. Okay. It is, however,
a downside because that does mean that there's that little
privacy and security piece where student videos potentially or
student data potentially are out there on loom site. I'm not
saying you shouldn't use it for that reason. I'm just saying it's
something to keep in mind. Okay, the next thing that's really
nice about both features is they both operate as a Chrome
extension. So if you're using Google Chrome, both screencastify
and loom will work right inside of Chrome. Now screencastify only
works in Google Chrome. So if you're using Firefox or Microsoft
Edge or something like that, screencastify is not an option for
you. And you're probably not using them anyhow, because you're
using a tool where the recordings automatically go into Google
Drive. So you're probably not using it. But it's important to
know it's only going to work in Google Chrome loom does not work
in any other browser, at least not currently, you can play the
videos in other browsers, but you can't record them in anything
other than Google Chrome. However, loom does have a software
version available. Okay, now that won't work on a Chromebook. But
if you're using a Mac computer or a PC computer, you do have
opposite access to the software version of loom, which does offer
a lot more capability than the current a lot more but more
capability than the Chrome extension does. That is a nice feature
that you have there. Okay. Now surprisingly, this surprises me
that loom has a software version available yet you have to be on
the internet for that to work. That really seems odd to me. So
loom only works when you're connected to the internet.


screencastify, however, can record while you're offline, so you
can access the extension record. And then as soon as you connect
back to the internet, your recording will sync to your Google
Drive. So there's a little bit of a situation in the middle there
where you know, you're not exactly completely sure that your
video is safe. But as soon as you connect to the internet, it'll
upload I've never heard about it. Anybody saying they lost a
video During that time, but it is a possible issue. But that's
nice to know that you could record screencastify when you're in a
situation without internet and then sync it up later loom that's
just not an option, even with the software version, which really
surprised me. Okay, some of the really nice things about
screencastify it's really easy to insert your videos into Google
Slides. That's because you can say add a video from Drive, click,
there's your screencastify recordings, put them right in there,
so super easy to put them in Google Slides. screencastify also
has built in easy one click Options to send your video to YouTube
to send your video to edpuzzle to send your video to Google
Classroom to send your video to remind to send your video to
Gmail to send your video to waitlet and they've said that they
intend to add more in the future. Okay. Now both tools easily
allow you to share a link to your video. It's a one click thing
to get that link and have that link be ready to share with other
viewers and have that link work for those other viewers. Both
tools also very easily send your video via Gmail email, click a
button. It's in the email. It's ready to be sent out easy with
Both of those tools loom however, doesn't have those easy options
for YouTube and edpuzzle and remind and Gmail and waitlet Google
Classroom however, you could easily get those there with a multi
step process right there's not a button to jump right over there.
So for YouTube for example, you download the video from loom you
go to YouTube, you upload the video to YouTube for edpuzzle you
download the video from zoom, you go to edpuzzle you upload the
video to edpuzzle it works it's not super inconvenient, but
screencastify it's a little more convenient if you're judging the
tools based on that factor though. I think I think that either
tool is fine for you that's really splitting hairs to say those
two things about the tools. Okay, so now let's look at export and
download options. So screencastify added not too long ago, the
ability to export your videos as gifts, so silent, looping image
files that play like a video and then loop at the end and they
can be any length you want. I believe you want to keep them
relatively short if they're a gift, but it is possible in
screencastify to record a screen recording And then download it
as a gift that you can then put somewhere like in Google Slides
to have it autoplay, that's not an option in loom, you can in
loom, make the video and they use a different tool to turn it
into a gift, but it's not a built in thing and loom screencastify
also lets you export your your video as audio only. So you could
record it as if it's a video, but then export just the audio and
post it as a podcast or something like that. That's an option in
screencastify. That's not there and loom However, in loom, you
could certainly record the video and then use a different tool to
rip that audio out of there, it would just be a little more
complex than screencastify where it just says Download as mp3 and
boom, you've got an audio file that you can post somewhere. Both
of them export videos as mp4 video files, which is one of the
most common video files out there. screencastify used to only do
dot web m videos or web movie videos, which was problematic
because it didn't work in all platforms. But they now do mp4 is
as does loom so that's a really easily easy to access video
format that you could use in other other locations. Okay, now
while loom does offer all of those exporting options. What it
does give you is the ability to actually automatically have your
videos embedded on a web page for viewing. Now on Google Drive,
you could share it out and the viewers will view it as if it's in
a drive. And it's just not a pretty screen. But it works right in
loom, you have this really nice web page view. With a with a loom
video automatically embedded there, the link automatically ready
to go. And in it, you can add in viewer commenting or turn it
off. If you don't want it, you can add in viewers leaving emoji
reactions like they do on some live video platforms. And you
could turn that off if you don't want it. You can also make those
videos password protected. Now, in Google and screencastify. You
could kind of do all of these things with some hacks. Like for
the comments, I guess you could embed it in a Google Slides or
Google site or something like that and embed it in a tool that
allows commenting but it's not built right into screencastify
like it is to loom same with the emoji reactions not built right
into screencastify like it is to loom and same with the password
protecting thing. There's really no way to password protect a
screencastify video unless you do a hack where like they have To
fill out a Google form with the correct password to get to the
video, but that is a hack and loom has it built right into the
tool where you can make your videos password protected. Okay, in
loom, you can also see which viewers have watched your video, no
way directly to do that in screencastify, you could use a tool
like edpuzzle to confirm it. It's been viewed, but no way in
screencastify itself to do that. Now with loom. This only works
if your viewers have loom accounts, which is pretty rare, I think
in schools that all of the students have loom accounts too. And
that would be something you would definitely want your school
technology administration to decide if it's appropriate for your
students to have loom video accounts anyhow,


but if the kids do have loom video accounts, you will be able to
see as long as they were logged into their account when they
viewed you will be able to see which kids have and have not
viewed your video. Okay, so that is a nice feature that it adds
in there especially if your kids have loom accounts if they don't
have live accounts. It's a worthless feature to you. Okay, now
some features of what's actually available and the different
recordings screencastify has a current spotlight built right into
the tool. That means if you turn this on, it blacks out most of
the screen and makes white the area around your cursor so that if
you really need to show someone, something you're pointing to, or
certain area of the screen, it's automatically highlighted right
there so people cannot miss it. That's something that's not
available in loom. Both tools have available a pen tool, that
means you could actually write on your screen. Now it's available
in the free version of screencastify.


With loom I believe this is a paid feature only. But again,
educators have access to the paid features. And with loom. It's
only available in the desktop version. So if you're on a
Chromebook, you're not going to be able to use the pen tool in
loom. If you're on a Mac or PC and you download the software then
you will be able to use that pen tool in loom. Okay, next
screencastify has click highlighting that means when you click on
something you see rings appear around it so the viewer knows you
just click There, that's not in the loom chrome version that is
in the loom software version. So if you're using loom on a Mac or
a PC, you could turn on that click highlighting the highlight the
areas you've clicked on. Nice tool for people with vision loss or
visual visual difficulties. Also nice just to draw a user of
viewers attention to a certain area of the screen. Okay, both
tools also give you the option of recording tab audio. What that
means is if you're in tab recording mode, not recording your
whole screen, but just recording one tab, you could have the
audio from that tab, like a YouTube video that's playing or
something, go into your actual video recording not out of the
speaker and into the microphone, but actually be recorded through
the computer at a crystal clear, almost perfect sound level. So
that's possible in both tools. So be careful if you're doing
those things to make sure you're obeying copyright laws when you
do that kind of stuff. Okay, next, both tools allow you to trim
the beginnings and the ends of the video. So if at the beginning,
you're kind of getting yourself set and you don't really have you
know what you're going to say in your head already. At the end,
if it takes you a minute to find the stop button, you could trim
those parts off and both screencastify and loom loom however,
adds in the ability to cut parts anywhere in the video. So if
there was a spot in the middle of the video where your kid ran
into the room to tell you they needed their cup filled up or
something, which happens to me regularly, you can cut that part
out in loom, you cannot do the screencastify in the free version.
In the paid version, however, you can cut out parts from within
the video. But in loom, you could do it in the free version. And
in the pro version that's free to teachers at least. Okay, loom
in the pro version, it's free to teachers ads in a call to action
button. What this means is, you can add a link into your video
that stays in your video from the beginning and to the end that
users can click on it could be a link to anything that you want.
You can only have one of these links. It's only available in the
pro version. It's free to teachers, and it can you could do some
formatting of what it looks like. But with the screencastify
video, you could always put a link like like I don't know in the
description or something like that, wherever you're posting it to
or something like that. But it is a nice feature that's built
into loom there. Next, loom also has an iOS app. Now having an
iOS app on the loom seems kind of silly to some people because
they're like I can already record from my my iPhone and I can
already screen record on my iPhone. Why would I want it to be a
loom? Well, the nice thing here is that if you have that loom
account and you record from the loom iOS app, then it's going to
automatically put that on a loom page so that you can send that
link out. So it saves you that step of getting that video
somewhere where your viewer can view it loom takes that step out
and makes it already readily available to them and shareable to
them. Another feature that I love on loom is that you could
toggle between cameras mid recording, so if I have a webcam over
here, and I have a webcam over here and I want to switch between
the two of them, I can mid recording, where I think that's super
powerful for teachers is if I have a webcam recording, and I have
a document camera attached, I could toggle between the two of
them in the recording, not an option screencastify even if you
haven't hooked up, you cannot toggle between them and
screencastify it's a really nice feature in loom Okay, so up next
screencastify has recently added in a tool that's still in beta,
but it looks really awesome. And that is called screencastify.
Submit screencastify. Submit works a little bit like flipgrid, if
you're familiar with flipgrid, but allows the teacher to send a
link out to their students, maybe by posting in Google classroom,
and have the students respond with recordings of their own back
to the teacher, the nice thing here a couple nice things, those
recordings automatically go into your Google Drive. So they're
all organized in one place. And they don't, it doesn't matter
what device the kids are on recording from, it doesn't matter if
the kids have a screencastify account. It doesn't matter if the
kids have the screencastify extension, it will automatically work
even on their phone, you could send them this link and they'd be
able to record from there. So really cool for that feature,


where it falls short of something like a tool like flipgrid is it
there's no commenting and communication piece there. But maybe
that's not what you want this for anyhow, maybe you're just
trying to collect a set of videos that you're going to use for
some kind of project or something like that. And screencastify
submit would be really nice for that. Now, as I'm recording this,
this video, that screencast I submit is still in beta. It looks
great. I've actually explored a bit, it looks like a really good
tool. However, we don't know what aspects of it will be free and
what aspects will not, we do know that it will have a free
version. And it sounds like it will have a paid version. And you
don't have to use screencastify for your own recordings to use
screencastify. Submit, I guess there's no reason you can't use
loom for most of your recordings. And then also use screencastify
Submit. But it's nice when the tools you're using have extra
things in there that you like using them for. Both tools allow
you to organize videos into folders in screencastify. That would
be inside of your Google Drive in loom that's actually on the
loom website, which is a feature that I really like on loom but
again, some educators do have a problem with the fact that their
data or their students data is being stored on somebody else's
website. Now once your district has approved, whatever kinds of
protocols they use for the data there, maybe it's not a big deal.
Okay, now I want to talk about one thing that I dislike about
both of these apps. This is the one thing that really bothers me
about both of these tools. Neither of them have an option for
auto captioning your video or editing the captions of your So you
can't use screencastify or loom, have it pick up your voice and
turn into closed captions at the bottom of the screen. And you
can't add your own captions to it either. It's just not an option
either tool you can use do something like having Google Slides
running with your captions turned on and have it screen recording
the captions. As the video goes, that's a nice hack, but you
can't then edit those captions. So if it miss hears you and puts
weird words on your screen that you don't really say, there's
nothing you do about it. You could also upload your video to
YouTube, YouTube will automatically happen and then you can
actually edit your YouTube captions. And there are other tools we
can do stuff like that, but it stinks and screencastify and loom
don't have that I really bothers me and I hope they will they
will follow up on that in future because we really do need to
help everybody be able to access our information effectively now
screencast o Matic which I mentioned earlier, is lacking behind
these tools and a lot of features. However, they do have
captioning built in. So that is a strong reason to look into
using screencast o Matic. The reason I take screencast o Matic
out of here is because their free version has pretty limited
features and allows 15 minute long videos so if the recording
length is your issue Luma offers unlimited if the features are
your issue screencastify has more. So that's why it takes your
cast ematic out however, the fact that they have captioning built
into it is really nice and screencast max paid version it has a
fantastic editor the blows these two out of the water. So if you
really wanna be able to edit your videos screencast o Matic is a
tool you might want to consider they're in the free version of
screencast o Matic, you can upload your own caption, so make your
captions using a different tool and then upload them to your
video and put them in. If you have a paid version of screencast o
Matic it will actually auto caption the video for you and let you
edit those captions. It really stinks to screencastify loom don't
have that they just don't unfortunately. Okay. Next, I mentioned
a couple times about student privacy and student data between the
two apps and something we really need to be cognizant of in our
schools as we work with kids, especially those under the age of
13. But those over the age of 13 as well and teacher data and
things like that too. We do need keep everybody involved in
education, setting safe and their data information and privacy
safe as well. So both of these tools state that they comply with
capa the children's online privacy and Protection Act, which
governs the collection use and disclosure of personal information
collected from children under the age of 13. So if you're working
with students under the age of 13, you can feel confident that
they are complying or at least they say they're complying with
the laws that are meant to protect the privacy of these students.
Now, I should note that screencastify is certified as complying
with HIPAA law as per i keep safe.org loom however, is not
certified by anybody, but they do state that they comply with it.
I'm not sure if that means they've been checked and haven't been
approved, or if they just haven't been checked, maybe and so it's
moved but


screencastify is certified as being copper compliant. loom
however, is not currently certified, but they do state on their
site that they they do comply with the expectations of it. Now
capa law is for students under the age of 13. This really doesn't
apply to you as the teacher and the videos you're making because
you are not under the age of 13 unless you're some kind of like
Doogie Howser teacher or something like that. The law that's a
little more important here is FERPA law. And again, screencastify
is certified as complying with FERPA loum states that they comply
with FERPA but there's no certification to document that. And
FERPA is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which
protects the privacy of student education records. So if you're
potentially seeing student names, or showing student projects in
your video, you know that both of these tools do comply with
FERPA that doesn't mean they're perfect in terms of privacy and
everything and keep everything completely secure. It just means
that they meet the requirements of those apps. Okay. Now, loom
also complies with the GDPR. That's called the general data
protection regulation. That's something in the European Union.
That's data protection and privacy in the European Union and in
the European Economic Area area. Now on loom site, they say that
they are GDPR compliant. On screencastify site, it doesn't say
that they are GDPR compliant. However, on Common Sense Media
site, they did a privacy evaluation screencast of screencastify
and said that they felt that it was 96% likely to meet this
compliance. So it's possible screencastify actually does meet
GDPR compliance but don't have a certification that says so who
knows? I don't know. One thing screencastify does have
certification that says so is that they are so PIPA compliant and
so people compliant is the student online Personal Information
Protection Act, which is a super comprehensive student data
privacy legislation from California. It is industry targeted. So
the fact that they comply with it is really great for
screencastify. There's no certification saying that loom at least
not that I've seen that loom is certified as compliant with it.
It doesn't mean the loom doesn't it means there's no certificate
certified proof that they do. Okay, so that does it. That is my
comparison between screencastify and loom. Again, as I told you,
I really can't tell you the right answer here. But there is
probably right answer for you. Hopefully I've highlighted some of
the things that make this decision a little bit easier for you.
If you'd like to hear me add in some other tools to this like
maybe you want screencastify and loom compared with screencast o
Matic or with Camtasia or with Nimbus or with flipgrid screamer
screen recorder. If you'd like to see any of those things, please
reach out to me either in the comments in the YouTube video, or
via email or via social media at Jake Miller tech or anything
like that. And let me know and wherever you're viewing this from,
whether it's my blog page or my YouTube channel or my podcast, I
recommend that you subscribe so that when I do future tool, tool
evaluations like this, you will be aware of them. Okay. Again, if
you're an educator, thank you so much for all you do. I really
appreciate how hard you're working for your students and that
your students are at home watching silly videos on YouTube right
now probably. And you are sitting here watching a video from me
about two different screen recording tools. We're all nerds, but
I appreciate what you're doing for your students.