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This video will show you the easiest way to share ideas! This can be used for training videos, communicating with your team and much more.

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video transcript:

How to Share Ideas Online with Loom – A Tutorial on How to Use Loom

Welcome to my new training series, Going Remote. I know that, right now, there are a lot of you that are trying to figure out how to move your work completely online, and how to work remotely in the most effective way possible. For the next 30 days, I’m going to be posting as many new trainings as I can to help you with this. I’ve been working remotely for a long time now, and I’m constantly testing out new tech tools, so I think this will be really helpful for you.

Today’s video is going to be all about how to share ideas online. It can be really hard when you are limited to just online communication, and that’s where today’s tool – Loom – comes in to help. Loom allows you to easily share your screen, and therefore share ideas online, so much faster and more effectively. There are so many different applications for this, from teaching to creating training videos, to just communicating with others instead of sending an email. Loom is going to make it so much clearer and easier for you to get your ideas across. It’s a Chrome Extension and also a Desktop App for both Mac and PC, and I think you’re really going to love it. Let’s dive into the tutorial right now. I’m going to walk you through everything that you need to know in order to share ideas online and start communicating more effectively.

Loom Free Trial

The first thing you’re going to do is go to Loom.com, and you’re just going to click Get Loom for Free. Then you’re going to type in your email to create a free account. Then you just need to type in your first name, last name, create a password, and click Continue. Now you have 2 options to choose from – the Chrome Extension or the Desktop App - both of which are fantastic. Really, you can choose either of the two.

For the Chrome Extension, you’re just going to click Install Extension and then you’re going to click Add to Chrome, and then Add Extension, and you’ll see the Loom icon appear right up here at the top.

Let’s go back to the Desktop App. Click Download App, and that is going to download to your computer. I’m on a Mac, so it’s going to download here. I’m going to open up my Downloads folder, double-click on that file to open it up, and then I’m going to click on this Loom icon here and drag it into my Applications folder. Within the Desktop App, If you would like, you can enable Notifications, by clicking Allow at the prompt. This is what the backend of Loom looks like, and this is where all your videos will be stored.

Loom Chrome Extension

Let’s do a demo using the Chrome Extension. All you need to do is come up here, top right, and click on the Loom Chrome Extension. Then you’re going to click One-Click Access so that they can use your microphone and camera, and then click Allow. Now we are ready to go.

Before we dive into filming, there is just one thing I recommend you do. Come up here, top right, to your Profile, click Account Settings, and upload a profile picture here. You’re also going to need to verify your email address – they will have sent you an email.

Let’s go back Home. Now I’m going to show you how to use the Chrome Extension. Come up here, click on the Loom Chrome Extension, and now you will see yourself onscreen right over here, bottom left. (I’m going to dismiss this notification about desktop for right now.)

Screen & Camera Options

So, we have a few options – Screen+Cam, Screen Only and Cam Only. You can record your screen and cam at the same time, so that you show up onscreen and you’re personalizing your videos a little bit. You can choose just to share your screen - if you do this, your profile picture will come up. You can choose to display that if you want, or you can simply X out here and not show that picture. Or, you can do your cam only, which is just going to show you.

The one I use most often is Screen+Cam. What you’re going to do is click Show Advanced Options, and you can make sure that it is using the right camera and microphone. It’s just a dropdown right here to select your camera and microphone as well. You’ll see a few other options – don’t worry about those – I just leave these as default.

Recording Options

Now you’re going to click Start Recording. You can choose whether you want to share your entire screen or just an application window. This would be showing just Google Chrome for example, whereas if I choose my desktop, that’s going to be my entire screen. Maybe you need to demo you using a certain app on your computer, in which case you’re going to want to choose your entire screen. I’m going to click Share. Then it’s going to give you a countdown and you can start recording. (I just like to hide this message down here.). Then, what it’s going to do, is it’s going to record anything on my screen. I can go ahead and I can demo exactly what I need someone to do – this really comes in handy. Anywhere where I need to say click here, click there, explaining a particular issue or training that you need, any movement on your screen is going to be recorded.

Then when you are done, you’re going to come down here to the bottom and you’re going to click on the Checkmark to finish recording. So, that is your first Loom video. As you can see, it is recorded here. This is maybe one of the best parts about Loom – everything is recorded and saved online. You don’t need to download a video, then upload it, then edit it – all of those steps are gone. You would come over here and first title your video, so just double-click on the text below the video and then add your title. Then, if you want to play the video, you can just go ahead and click the Play button here. I’m going to do that for a second and show you what it looks like. All of your movements onscreen - as well as you on camera - it’s all going to be recorded.

Sharing the Video

What I love about this software so much is that it’s all stored online. This is a huge time-saver. There’s no downloading, then editing, then uploading – all of those steps are taken out and you can simply share this link for this specific video with others. All you need to do is go over here, click Copy Link, and then, when you share that with others, they click on that link and they’re going to see your video – and they can watch it at a few different speeds which is really convenient. They can react to the video with an emoji, and then they can also give you some comments down below it. On top of this, they can also download the video and share it out. I love the interface of this software.

Let’s go back. This is your settings – you’re controlling what happens here. We’ve copied that link. I also want to show you your Privacy options – you can choose that only people with the link can see your video, or you can choose to make this public.

Editing Options

Then down here, under Edit Your Video, if you click on Settings, you’ll see a few different options as well. For example, if you don’t want people to be able to download it, then you can go ahead and turn that off. Then you’ll see we have the option to Trim. You can actually edit out any mistakes that may accidentally happen. You can actually trim those out in the editor here.

You can also add a Call-to-Action on your video, so that would be a button like this here at the top, and you can add a Custom Thumbnail. If you just click Custom Thumbnail here, you’ll be able to upload an image and replace the thumbnail.

Organize Your Videos

There is a lot that you can do here. You can also organize everything into folders. You can click Move to Folder, then you can go ahead and create a new folder and keep everything organized. Basically, this is going to just speed up your workflow so much. Rather than trying to type out instructions via text, now you can simply quickly come up here, click on the Chrome Extension, record your video, copy the link, send it over and you are good to go.

Even those editing extras that I just showed you – you don’t even need to do those. I think this is a really effective tool for speed, so I wouldn’t worry if you say “um” or something - that’s fine – you don’t really need to trim that out. The Call-to-Action and Custom Thumbnail depends on what type of video you’re doing. I’ve found Loom to be most beneficial for quick communication – but then I also do use it for my course videos. I teach online courses and for those it’s super-important that these videos are really professional and perfect, so then we do use this Trim feature sometimes.

Loom Desktop App

Now I’m going to show you the Desktop App. Once you download it, it’s going to show up right up here at the top of your screen. When you want to record, you’re just going to click on it and you’ll see your 3 different options appear. I always just do Full Screen, but you could also do Window or a Custom Size. I’m going to go ahead with Full Screen, then click Start Recording.

Pause the Recording

This is very similar to the Chrome Extension. It’s going to be recording all of my movements, as well as my voiceover. But there are a few more benefits here. What I can actually do, is I can come over to the left and this little panel will appear. Then what you can do is you can actually pause the recording. This is huge – this is what I use for filming any of my course videos, and it has saved me so much time. Before this, I would have had to film the video and then anytime there was a wait period - for example, I’m waiting for a page to load - I would need to then film over that, go back, and edit it out so that my students weren’t waiting around for that page to load. This completely eliminates that, and now you can just come over here, pause the recording, and then when you’re ready to film again, you just come back over here and hit the Play button and it’s all within the same video file. So, this is huge. Whether you’re like me and you need to wait for something to load, or maybe you just want to take a minute to regroup your thoughts, it’s incredible. Hopefully you can tell from my voice how exciting this particular feature is – I think it will save you a ton of time. This is part of the reason why I use the Desktop App.

Using the Paintbrush

They also have this other cool feature – I don’t use it often – but I am going to show it to you. Basically, you click on the little Paintbrush icon right there, and what you can do is you can actually draw on your screen. That’s really cool - you can draw your attention to certain items that you need to - I’m going to hit Done on that. That is the Desktop version. When you are done filming, you’re just going to come up here, click on this little red square, and then it’s going to open up that window for you with your video recording already saved and easily accessible online.

Now that you know how to use Loom, let’s go over a few other things. Once you have finished recording, if you click on My Videos you will see it right here – this will be your most recent video. Then, if you want you can organize this into folders, you just hover over it, click on this little square here, click Move, and you can move that to the appropriate folder - or you can click Create New Folder to create a new one. Definitely keep all of your videos organized – it can easily get out of control.

Loom Pricing

Now let’s talk about pricing - I’m just going to flip this to monthly. As you can see, the Basic plan is completely free, and then the Pro is just $5 per month. The Pro version is free for teachers and students, so that is fantastic. Loom has been doing something special because of COVID-19 – they have removed the recording limit on the free plan so that’s now unlimited. The Loom Pro plan is half of what it usually was, and all free trials are now 30 days. The Pro version will be free for education forever – so that’s just awesome - I really love this company.

Then you can just come down here and you can see if you need the Basic or Pro – click Show All Features and then you can compare. I didn’t realize this, but it does say that the high-definition option is Mac only for now. I’m sure they will add that soon for Windows. Either way, I have found the quality to be really great, even if I’m not using the highest available quality.

So, this is Loom. I hope that you really enjoy using this tool and that it helps you significantly to share ideas online as you move your work remote.

That’s it for today’s video. I hope that you love Loom as much as I do, and that it helps you communicate more effectively and share ideas online while working from home. If you found this video helpful, please let me know by giving it a thumbs up, and share it out with others that you think will benefit from it. Don’t forget to hit Subscribe because I’m going to be posting a lot more training videos for going remote. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you soon.