Video Literacy Tools
What To Do at This Station?
- Explore the Tools to Create Videos section.
- Pick one of those tools and create a 1 minute introduction to you video that you could share with your students in the fall (it can be as simple as using your webcam to record a quick hello!)
- Explore the Tools for Video Instruction section.
- Choose one of the platforms and find a video that you can start with. Edit it to make it your own to use with students in the fall.
- Explore the Tools to Increase Video Literacy and Student Focus section.
- Play around with the tools.
Tools to Create Videos
Why Videos?
Why videos? Videos have become such a powerful learning tool both in and out of the classroom. There have been a number of reports that YouTube is the second largest search engine, and that's not surprising. Students are not only drawn to videos, but state ELA tests now show a video to students and then they have to answer questions… no reading passages involved.
Screencasts
Screencast-o-matic - works on Macs & PCs to record anything on your computer. (tutorials here)
Screencastify- works on Chromebooks (tutorials here)
Educreations- very popular (paid) iPad app (tutorials here)
What are Screencasts?
Screencasts are videos of what is happening on your computer. It records everything happening on screen and your voice.
General Videos
Stupeflix- create easy drag and drop videos with pictures and video clips. (tutorials here)
Powtoon- create animated videos (tutorials here)
iMovie- default video creator program on a Mac. Also available as an iPhone or iPad app (tutorials here)
Tools for Video Instruction
Playposit- lets you take a video and embed questions throughout. There is also a Schoology App that will set up your classes, enroll your students, and then let students access assigned Playposits via Schoology. (tutorials here)
EdPuzzle- Another site that lets you embed questions throughout the video. EdPuzzle integrates with Google Classroom. (tutorials here)
For an example of a Playposit (very similar to EdPuzzle) click the image below.
Tools to Increase Video Literacy and Student Focus
The following was taken from talktechwithme.com
Any of the three tools would be helpful when pairing videos with Hyperdocs (check out my post about using Hyperdocs here for more information on a Hyperdoc), but DocuTube is especially helpful with using videos with Google Docs because it keeps students from getting distracted on YouTube with other irrelevant videos by playing the video right inside the Google Doc (in a pop-up window). I also just wrote about DocuTube in my post 8 Essential Google Drive Elements to Create Hyperdocs. Watch the short video below to see DocuTube in action.
TurboNote is an incredible extension that allows you to take notes while you watch a video, and it automatically timestamps the notes. You can save the notes as a PDF (with hyperlinks to specific timestamps in the video) and share them like any other document in Google Drive. There is also a “Watch Together” option, which allows you to invite other people to watch the video from their own device, syncs the video play time with everyone viewing and time stamps any notes made in the chat area between all participants. Hello, amazing!
BriefTube is a Chrome extension that will instantly summarize, create a transcript and table of contents, show you a word cloud of common words mentioned in the video and more. Simply install the extension, then click it when you are viewing a YouTube video and voilà: there is your video summary. This is a freemium service, so with the free version, you are limited to the first half of the video. The paid version starts as low as $3 per month (at the time this post was written).
