Loom
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collaborative Tools | Software | Personal Skills | Productivity Tools | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
What, Why & When
Loom is a video recording software which lets you easily record your screen and yourself at the same time right in your browser. This way, you can show your work or ideas to colleagues or others, and not waste time and harddrive space on recording videos right on your computer.
Goals
- Communicate your work to colleagues, collaborators, students in a way that is precise and engaging.
- Better enable others to prepare for meetings.
Getting started
For some situations, it might be practical to record your screen and talk over what is shown. Loom lets you record your browser, Excel file, presentation or anything you open on your computer, and record your face and voice while clicking through the applications. For browser recordings, you can simply enable a Loom extension; for anything else, you download the software; and there is also a mobile app. You just record the video and share the link, potentially with a call to action or further informationa ttached, and others can simply watch it online.
We found Loom to be helpful to convey a point to colleagues so that they can prepare for a meeting, or to quickly summarize our work for colleagues and others, so that they can engage with the video whenever they find the time. Loom is easier than recording the video with external software, and sharing or re-uploading the created .mp4-file. As opposed to video-call screen-sharing, Loom can be used asynchronously.
Loom is free for anyone and allows for 5-minute videos, up to 100 videos in total. There are paid options that allow for recordings of up to 45 minutes, and these are free for educational accounts.
Links & Further reading
The author of this entry is Christopher Franz.
