After scouring my Pinterest boards and diigo lists, the two tools that appealed to me right away were Knovio and Present.me. Why? Because they are easy to use, and I needed to make some videos pronto. Both work very similarly--you upload a PowerPoint presentation, and then you record yourself talking through the presentation, either with a picture of your mug next to it or just recording your disembodied voice. They are also both super-easy to use; my students have used both of them, and all of them figured out how to use them with no instruction from yours truly. However, they both have some differences that may influence your choice in using them in your classroom.
Let's start with Present.me. This tool has a lot of features I like, and I would use it much more often--if it weren't for the fact that, under the free plan, you only get 3 presentations per month. They do have an education plan where you can subscribe at a deep discount, but I'm not sure if it includes student accounts or if it only applies to teacher accounts. To be honest, the main reason why I haven't been using it more often is because of that 3 per month restriction on the free plan (and because if you move around a lot during video recording you look like a video game character from the 1980s).
Despite those small drawbacks, Present.me has a lot going for it. You have a lot of choices even in the free account, as you can see in the picture below:
As far as uploading your presentation, you can upload your typical PowerPoint (if it's heavily formatted you may run into some conversion issues--I saw this with some of my students' presentations), or you can upload a PDF file or a Google Doc. When recording your presentation, you can move freely back and forth among your slides. After creating your presentation, you have a few other cool options, as pictured below:
Knovio, which is in beta, is missing a few of the features of Present.me, but is still a nice solid totally free tool. The biggest advantage of using Knovio at this moment in time is that you aren't limited in the amount of presentations you make in the free version (that I know of right now). Unlike Present.me, however, Knovio currently only accepts PowerPoint files for upload. After processing, it lets you know your presentation is ready (with a "ding!" that makes me want to fasten my airplane seatbelt), and you can view your slides before recording to make sure it still looks the way you would like it to look. Then you will be taken to the recording screen, which looks like this:
After you're all done, you can share your presentation at this screen:
If you'd like to see a sample Knovio I made, you can click here. Please note that students can send you feedback on the video by clicking on the feedback button. I like this feature, because it allows students to ask you questions that they have at the time they're watching the video privately via email. (Be aware that I have already had to stifle a lot of silly comments coming through. It's all about teaching good digital citizenship as you go.)
One feature that Knovio doesn't have (that Present.me does) is putting the number of views for each of your presentations somewhere in your dashboard. Currently, when someone clicks on your Knovio presentation, you get an email telling you that someone just viewed your presentation and where it was from. While this is nice to know if you are having students view your presentations outside of class, when you have 28 students all view your presentation during class the emails get pretty annoying. I sent Knovio feedback about this using their feedback button, and in the lightning-fast response I got, they told me they could turn that feature off on their end, which is good to know. However, it would be nice if the viewing information was listed near the presentation in the "My Presentations" dashboard.
So, which one am I using right now until the husband finally realizes that I'm dead serious about that copy of Camtasia? Knovio. The main reason is that whole "I can record more than 3 per month for free" thing. While I don't like that I can't flip backwards and forwards during my presentation while recording, it does provide better video quality (in my experience with my webcams) and gets the same end goal accomplished.
Have you found any other free tools you like to use for flipping your classroom? If so, please share!