Update:  Over the last few months, the folks at Techsmith have been hard at work developing a screencasting tool for Chrome OS.  Just like their Jing product did for teachers using Windows and Mac machines, Snagit for Chrome promises to be a simple, yet fully featured image and video screencapture tool that integrates with Google Drive and works great on a Chromebook.  It is recently out of Beta, so check it out here!

As a prolific user and promoter of Google's Chrome operating system, I often sing its praises regarding speed, simplicity and security.  However, the one area where I have not been able to fully embrace Chrome has been the lack of a good screen recording option.  The only real viable option has been to do a Hangout with myself and enable the screenshare option.

In the last few days, weeks and months however, more options have become available in the Chrome Web Store. Most notably, just yesterday a new Chrome extension--Screencastify--was released.  Screencastify places a small icon in your extension toolbar that gives you the ability to record actions in a tab and audio from a microphone.  The quality is not great, and I did not see any option to enable a pointer tool or halo (like you get with Screencastomatic), but for creating short tutorial videos, Screencastify is a nice option.

Another web app that I have found in the last few days is Pixiclip.  If you have used Educreations or Showme on iOS, then you know exactly what Pixiclip can do.  Rather than recording your screen, it provides a white canvas on which you can draw shapes and record audio/video.  I would love to try this tool on the new Acer C720P touchscreen.

Finally, Movenote is a tool that was released in September.  It allows you to record yourself using the webcam and places the video next to a Powerpoint or Google Slides presentation. While not a screenrecording tool, per se, it does give an easy option for making presentations.  The nice thing about Movenote is that it is truly cross platform--available as a Chrome app and for iOS and Android as well.