Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

While online videos offer a wealth of information, sometimes teachers only want to share a small section of a video to a classroom of students. Or they want to annotate a section of a video as a highlight. Or maybe, they want to zoom into something particular. A new site called EmbedPlus gives you these options, as well as an embed code so you can post the video on your own site.

EmbedPlus walks you through a variety of steps, which begin with submitting the URL of the video you want to work with. From there, the options include: scene skipping, cropping, slow motion, zooming, and even a live-discussion feature. In my own tests, the controls worked well and seemed fairly simple to use. The developers of the site have clearly been listening for educators, too, as they have developed a page of possibilities for using EmbedPlus in the classroom.

EmbedPlus

Related stuff

Add video to Google Docs

Shhhh — Quiet Tube eliminates clutter on YouTube pages

Jump into video editing with JayCut

BY REBECCAH HAINES

Do you ever sit around and think to yourself, “Gosh, those people in the government sure don’t know what they’re doing! I could do so much better”? Well, Challenge.gov gives you a chance to take a crack at solving some issues, and even winning prizes.

The premise of the site is to get the public involved as a partner with the government to work on current issues like healthier school lunches, disaster preparedness, and helping the environment. There are tons of challenges you can browse, but here are a few of particular interest to educators:

1. Balloonsat High Altitude Flight Student Competition — This is a challenge for high school students to design a flight experiment or technology demonstration that, if chosen, will be sent to the stratosphere by NASA in a High Altitude Balloon. This competition is almost over, but if students can work quickly, there is still time for a submission.  NASA’s details on the guidelines for the competition can be found here. Submissions due February 11, 2011.
2. Calendar Cover Contest for womenshealth.gov — This challenge requests submissions of art for the 2012 Women’s Health calendar. High school art students may be an appropriate audience for this challenge. Giving students a real-world reason for doing a project usually motivates them to do a good job, and the prize of having nationally published art may just inspire them. Submissions due February 28, 2011.
3. It’s My Environment Video Project — This challenge, sponsored by the EPA, requests 10-second videos of people taking action to help the environment where they live. In your video, you must say or put up a sign that says “It’s My Environment,” and the best of the video submissions will be stitched together into more lengthy compilations. This one would definitely be fun for your students to do! Not only would they be submitting a video for the competition, in order to do so, they’d have to be out in the community serving the environment. Submissions due April 15, 2011.

If none of these current competitions strikes your fancy, keep checking the website. More challenges will be posted as various government agencies come up with problems for which they’d like public input.

Challenge.gov

Related stuff

Google Science Fair launches January 11

Discover what’s in your community by playing InterroBang

Solving global environmental issues: Something to SHOUT about!

Brooklyn Space Program sends video camera to space for science

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google Docs just got a bit more interesting, as you can now upload and share videos in Google Docs as well as documents, spreadsheets and drawings. It’s easy enough to do — just click “upload,” as if you were uploading a document, and the video goes into your Docs Home. There are some limits (no videos larger than 1 GB for example) but the addition of video allows a user to create folders on topics with all sorts of media.

So why host a video on Google Docs instead of YouTube? For teachers, it is an issue of access and privacy (you can share the link to your Google Doc with a select group of people or make it public or invite collaborators into the video file) and organization along subject areas (the Google Doc folder system). As with other platforms in Google Docs, you can toggle between various versions of your uploaded videos. Plus, if students are working on a video project together, Google Docs might be a more secure way of sharing video segments and final projects.

One thing you don’t seem to be able to do is to embed the video in other websites, so if that is your aim for video, then you may want to use Youtube or Vimeo or some other video-hosting service that is out there.

These are the video files you can upload into Google Docs:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Learn More about Video in Google Docs

Related stuff

Watch kid-friendly videos with Kideo Player

Shhhh — Quiet Tube eliminates clutter on YouTube pages

Try out Google Docs without a Google account on new demo site

BY AARON FOWLES

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you weren’t the greatest math student. The earlier math classes may not have been that hard, but Algebra 2 threw you through a loop. The teachers tried and tried with their overhead projector to make the problems spring to life, but nothing worked.  You just couldn’t picture it.

For the modern student, enter Khan Academy. This site and accompanying Youtube channel contain more than 1,800 short videos on topics mathematical, biological, chemical, and even historical.

It’s hard to sufficiently describe the wealth of knowledge hidden in these videos. Even harder to describe than the content of the videos is the creator, Salman Khan. Operating out of a closet in his home, Khan cranks out videos at breakneck pace using a simple tablet and display program. Khan Academy’s screencasts are picking up fans across the world, including Bill Gates.

Besides the videos, khanacademy.org also has self-paced and instantly graded practice activities that measure a learner’s mastery of the content. The results of these activities can be stored and accessed at a later time, making Khan Academy a great resource for teachers who want to develop a picture of a student’s progress.

Khan Academy

Related stuff

VideoScience: Another aptly named website

Watch kid-friendly videos with Kideo Player

Find quality science multimedia content at Nature.com

Educational videos, organized, at WatchKnow

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Tom Barrett has turned collaboration and sharing among teachers into an art form, and the results of these collaborations is a series of Google Presentations that can provide valuable insight into a wealth of possible technology tools for the classroom.

Tom (whose blog at EDTE.CH is worth a visit or two) has been exploring the possibility of iPods, Wallwisher, pocket video cameras, Twitter, Google Earth, Prezi and more as potential learning opportunities for students.

The real power comes when he asks teachers with ideas and experience to add to his presentations through the collaborative nature of Google Presentations. The result is a list of ever-growing resources that tap into a wide range of topics and levels of entry with a wide array of teaching voices.

Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways to…

• Get to Know Your New Class
• Ideas for Class Blog Posts
• Use a Learning Platform in the Classroom
• Support Spelling in the Classroom
• Teach Reading Comprehension in the Classroom
• Use Web Conferencing in the Classroom
• Make Your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn
• Use Audio in Your Classroom
• Use Wallwisher in the Classroom
• Support Writing in the Classroom
• Use an iPod Touch in the Classroom
• Nintendo Wii in the Classroom
• Use a Wiki in the Classroom
• Use a Visualizer in the Classroom
• Use Twitter in the Classroom
• Use Wordle in the Classroom
• Use Your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom
• Use Google Docs in the Classroom
• Use Google Earth in the Classroom
• Use a Nintendo DS in the Classroom
• Use Search Engines in the Classroom
• Use Your Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom
• Prezi in the Classroom
• Use Voicethread in the Classroom
• Use the iPad in the Classroom
• Use Google Search in the Classroom
• Use Google Maps in the Classroom

BY KEVIN HODGSON

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say most people now understand there is a wealth of valuable and interesting videos on YouTube. Of course, there is a wealth of not-so-great content, too, and often the good and the bad sit next to each other. Kideo Player is a website that showcases fun and educational videos for very young viewers by filtering out content inappropriate for young eyes.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

I have mostly avoided online video-editing platforms because I have found them too clunky or too slow to use. But recently, I decided to give JayCut a shot. Like most “cloud-based” applications, JayCut is housed entirely online. You upload the video content into your account, then the editing begins.

There is a lot to like about JayCut. The interface is fairly clean and straightforward. You drag and drop your raw videos, add titles and transitions, layer in music, and more.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you can spare five minutes, you can learn all about technology and the classroom. This is the idea behind Mark Barnes’ Learn It In 5 website, and I have to say the site does what it says. I watched a short video tutorial about using Twitter in the classroom (others focus on using YouTube, podcasting, wikis and more) and found it to be useful, simple in its explanation. and a perfect entry point for curious teachers.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

I know I’m lucky when it comes to school districts blocking YouTube. Mine doesn’t, and as a result, a number of teachers in my building are able to use videos from the site as part of our teaching. But I have to admit that while I do make sure anything I use is appropriate, I hate all of the side links to other videos and content. From a design standpoint, a YouTube page is a mess. From a teaching standpoint, I want my students focused on the video. There are an increasing number of programs that help reduce the clutter on a video page, but I happen to like Quiet Tube. It’s simple to use: you drag the Quiet Tube tab to your browser and then anytime you have a video that has extraneous material, just click on the Quiet Tube tab, and your browser will bring you to a page with mostly white space (or a black background, if you prefer) and your video. No distractions. (more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you watched the Super Bowl on television this year, you no doubt caught the Google commercial that told of a love story entirely through search queries. The ad, known as Parisian Love, was effective and I know I wondered — from a writing and teaching perspective — how it could be replicated. A complicated method of screencasting seemed to be the only thing I could think of, and that would be too cumbersome for most of us, including me. But Google has now made it simple to duplicate its efforts. The company launched a site called Google Search Story, which is an online digital story tool that allows users to create a shortened version of what we saw on the Parisian Love commercial.

(more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

We’ve touched on several video-capture tools and web-based file-conversion tools. Sometimes, though, you just can’t wait for Zamzar to get around to converting your file. Or maybe the video you need to work with is a local file and your online video capture tool won’t work on a local file. In cases like this you need a local solution installed on your computer, and Any Video Converter Freeware is an excellent choice for the job.

A completely free application, AVCF can convert most of the industry-standard file formats and output just as many (although you can’t input .swf files — it only outputs them). AVCF includes some editing functionality like cropping videos and arranging video clips to make movies (think iMovie without all the Apple aesthetics).

Speaking of Apple, those of you who don’t like iMovie and want to try something else, there is a mac version of AVCF.

Any Video Converter Freeware

Related stuff:

Zamzar: The easy file converter with an exotic name

Video DownloadHelper helpfully helps you download helpful videos. Helpfully.

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Sometimes I struggle to find quality educational multimedia elements. They either aren’t well made or don’t have much tangible educational value. This, however, is not the case over at nature.com in their multimedia section. You’ll find video presentations here on everything from self repairing rubber molecules to a study of honey bee genomes. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Here’s another easy way to download online videos so you can sneak them past the school firewall show your students valuable educational content. Similar to KickYouTube, Savevid lets you download videos simply by entering the URL of a video into the big green window. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

NASA eClips presents lots of great videos that STEM teachers in any grade level will find useful. Through several examples of applied science and math, kids will get a sense of the cool stuff they can do by studying the sciences.

Want to see how NASA made Michael Phelps’ swim suit so fast? Wonder what astronauts do to stay in shape in space? How about checking out if anybody’s at home on Mars? NASA eClips explores these and lots of other areas, churning out new videos each week during the school year. (more…)

BY MELISSA THIBAULT

Teachers rely on video for reaching different learners, as a resource to help those couple kids who didn’t “get it” the first time around, and as an instructional resource for conveying concepts that are visual and complex.  As the lead science teacher at a high school in Raleigh said recently at a professional conference, “We use YouTube every day. I couldn’t teach biology without it.”

But finding quality instructional video takes time. What if there was a website that collected the best free educational videos for children and made them findable and watchable on one website?

WatchKnow is a resource for you and your students, collecting the best free educational videos for children and made them findable and watchable on one website. WatchKnow organizes and categorizes video according to subject and education level. You can go or send your students to WatchKnow to find video that explains every topic that is studied in school instantly and reliably.

(more…)