Part 1: Finding and editing great videos with your students

Flipping your classroom? Found a great video about 18th century French military history that’s far too long for your students to stay focused on? Looking for great videos to share with students but stymied as to where to even start?

Worried that editing videos takes too much time and technical knowhow? Or possibly a different platform than the one you’re reading this blog entry on?

Let’s jam econo, y’all.

Send students fascinating, stimulating educational vids with the most pertinent points highlighted — or even clipped out into tiny mini-movies to maximize the amount of time you spend with their attention spans? Here’s how.

1. Finding videos:

Here are some great places to find videos you can use in the classroom:

• Documentary Addict (a big pile of searchable documentary videos)
• Veritasium (a science and engineering answers channel on YouTube)
• Numberphile (educational math videos involving dinosaurs, pool tables and extraneous heads of state)
• Crash Course (YA authors John and Hank Green teach history, biology, chemistry and environmental science)
• TedEd (where tons of folks have built lessons around videos so you can go watch Scandal with a glass of wi— orange juice.)

2. Cropping and editing videos

Professional development coordinator Susan Hennessey:

Just a few quick tips on how to find videos to support learning.  This short screencast demonstrates how I use the tools listed below to search for content-related videos to teach a concept, find a just-in-time resource, or help a student explore an interest or passion.

Hennessey covers how to SAVE videos by scooping them into EdPuzzle (which we’ve covered before because we love it) or DragonTape and then how to EDIT them with those two tools.

EdPuzzle gives you the opportunity to not just crop videos but also add commentary or questions or a poll for students to answer as they’re watching the video, turning the video into an interactive learning experience. It can also be used for differentiating content for your students. DragonTape is the quick n’ dirty snipping tool that lets you make what are essentially video mixtapes.

But I’m on a Chromebook

EdPuzzle can be used in a browser, if you’re on a Mac or Windows laptop, and it’s also available as a Chrome extension for use with Chromebooks.

Wait, now I’m on an iPad

DragonTape, unfortunately, has an iPad app that’s not available in the United States. But EdPuzzle works in the Safari browser on the iPad, even if only for editing and adding open-ended questions. Polls and multiple choice questions don’t work.

Which means…

This is an area where those of you with students looking for an app to develop could pretty much own the market.

And on that note…

In Part 2, we’ll cover the workflow for sharing your edited (but still great) videos on various platforms.