According to a news release this week, the Chicago-based Screencastify made its video-creation tools available to educators currently or previously enrolled in the Modern Classrooms Project’s virtual mentorship program. Those educators now have unlimited access to online tools for recording lectures and editing educational videos, potentially enabling students to consult and study them on their own time until they master the material.
The news release said the Modern Classrooms Project has trained and certified more than 700 educators and mentors globally to implement competency-based educational models in their own classrooms. Spokeswoman Samantha du Preez said the nonprofit has also partnered with other screen recording or annotation services in the past, including Edpuzzle, ScreenPal and Kami.
Screencastify, which is available via Internet browser, is used in 190 countries and has served more than 13 million customers since 2016. de Preez said Screencastify and other ed-tech tools advance the Modern Classrooms Project’s cause by allowing teachers to create educational materials that students can use on their own time, so class time can be spent addressing the specific needs of individual students rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach in which all students are expected to master the same daily lectures or assignments at the same pace.
“We know that’s not working,” she said. “Classroom educators are seeing the largest diversity of student needs in their careers. They need the curriculum and the ed-tech tools to deal with that.”
In a 2021 pilot program, Screencastify spent $25,000 to put 50 educators through its virtual mentor program, which included access to Screencastify’s tools. Positive feedback from that initiative prompted this partnership, de Preez said. According to the Modern Classrooms Project’s news release, 86 percent of educators enrolled in the program said their use of technology allowed them to work closely with individual students during class.
“Anyone who has spent time in the classroom knows that the task at hand perpetually feels unconquerable. But one place to start is in equipping educators with new methods that fundamentally restructure how they use space and time in the classrooms,” Modern Classrooms Project co-founder and CEO Kareem Farah said in a public statement. “With our partnership with Screencastify, the Modern Classrooms Project is investing in supporting teachers and unleashing their capacity.”
In an interview Wednesday, Screencastify CEO Vishal Shah said about 3,000 U.S. school districts are now using the end-to-end video creation platform. He credited the Modern Classrooms Project’s “surgical approach” with reaching learners individually, while Screencastify has a much broader goal of reaching as many districts and schools as possible.
“The way we think about it is, how many teachers do we impact?” Shah said, estimating that about 500,000 U.S. educators have used Screencastify.
In the next six or seven months, Screencastify will roll out AI-powered language translation and transcription functions, Shah said.
“There’s a lot of potential there,” he said.
