Technology Tips

  • Youtube can be a great tool to illustrate concepts or add enrichment to your classes! Here are a few tips to use it more effectively:

    • Slow down the speed of videos with audio that is too fast. While watching the video, click on the gear at the bottom right corner of the screen, choose "speed," and change it to 0.75 speed. In my experience, slowing down many videos to 0.75 (75% of normal speed) usually still sounds normal and may not even be noticeable, but can be much easier to process for your students. A full tutorial on slowing down videos is here.

    • Use captioning on videos. Click on the gear at the bottom right corner, choose "subtitles/CC," and choose English. You may also have a CC button next to the gear that you can just click. Note: if it says "English (auto-generated)," you should watch the video in its entirety BEFORE showing it with captions on to the students; the automatically-generated captions are often incorrect and may prove too confusing. For a video explanation (including showing how to search for videos that already have captions), watch this tutorial.

    • To avoid ads and trim videos down to just the part you'd like to watch, use https://safeshare.tv/. You will need to make a free account, but you'll be able to make 20 SafeView videos per month. Just paste the address of the Youtube or Vimeo video you'd like to use and then show the video without ads, choose where you'd like the video to start and stop (to skip unnecessary parts), and avoid automatically starting other videos after your video finishes. Many public school teachers use this site to safely show videos to their students.

    • You can still use video clips when teaching via Zoom! Open the video in a browser window, then, during the lesson, share your screen with students and go to that browser window. Be sure to check "share computer audio" on the sharing window.

    • The video below explains these tips and others for using videos in your lessons:

Many teachers use WhatsApp, a free smartphone app, to keep in touch with their students. This video explains how to download and use Whatsapp: