BubblePLY is a very cool annotation tool for online videos. It accepts more than just YouTube, but it makes no guarantees about those it will accept. I suppose you'll just have to try it out and see.
BubblePLY enables you to put text annotations, subtitles, and even images and video on top of the video. This is a great tool for teachers. Imagine the benefits of being able to annotate instructional videos.
Here is a sample (though, not good one) from my personal video collection:
[edit - The embed doesn't seem to work, which is unfortunate. I hope that they fix this. Here is the link to the video.]
Here is a screencast of the process done with Screenr. You'll notice the audio isn't very good. I think that's my microphone (and/or audio card). Both BubblePLY and Screenr is a great job, though.
TubeChop is a great YouTube editing tool. No need to register or log in.
As a teacher, I often just want to show a piece, or a series of pieces of a video to a class. TubeChop makes this easy. Just grab the URL for the YouTube video you want to edit (or do a keyword search from the YouChop site) and paste it into the text box on the YouChop homepage. YouChop with then load it into the editor and you can choose a range of time (the portion of the video you want to watch) using a slider for start and finish. Then "Chop It".
The site will them give you a link and embed code that you can use to disseminate the finished product. Very easy and very convenient.
Give it a try. Here is the resulting 10 second piece that I cut from a 5 minute video
This is great. I've often thought about choose your own adventure types of videos and how they would be great. Someone finally did the work to do it, using YouTubes annotation feature. This just blows me away (the idea, not necessarily the video :)
Just imagine doing one of these with your students. It would be great. They could all take a branch of the story. Maybe the class could determine a few endings and set a goal to reach those endings within a number of steps (depending on the scope of the project). This could be a sizable undertaking, but one that could be a LOT of fun. I have flashbacks of high school when students would do projects for variety shows and pep rallies. Some of these included pre-recorded video that students, teachers, administrators, and members of the public participated in. They were great. Take this to another level and take the adventures through multiple threads. Incredible potential here for a fun, educational activity.
Check out the start here and wait until the end to make your choice.
This is really good. I don't know if he did it as part of a school project or on his own, but it really rocks. I would like to thank fletcher3836 for the link.
I'm not showing you this just because I think it's fun. I'm showing you because this is the quality that our students can produce. It's not that difficult. With the editing software available today, mixing your own music videos is easy. I'm not going to say that the whole process is an afternoon affair, it's surely not. However, it is reasonable to expect teams of students to produce works of this nature.
Next term, for the first time, I am going to try to have my conversation class (intermediate) put together a video. I've been looking for ways to get them more involved and I think that this would be a good method. I'll give them examples of scripts, complete with stage directions, and then have them write ones of their own. I'll put together teams based on who is willing to be an actor/actress (not many will volunteer). I'll also make it clear that we will upload these to UCC (user-created content) sites like YouTube, Cyworld, Naver, and the like. I hope this become more of a motivation tool than a source of anxiety. We'll seel.
Fun video. While native speakers of English have no problem hearing most of the distinctions she makes in the video, non-native speakers often don't have an ear for most of those distinctions. It might be fun to show this to your students and ask them various questions about the quality of the accents (which is the most American? British?)
I'm going to use this with my pronunciation class.
Thanks to Clay Burell for pointing to this video. The video isn't great, but the concept is. In just about any class there are competing ideas, positions, beliefs, and so forth. This is a great approach to dealing with those AND this is a great example for teachers asking their students to do this or anything like it (I've seen this approach in some Language Arts and History classes).
I'm likely behind on promoting this video, but better late than never. It isn't a new message, but it's a great new way to present the message.
What is the message, you ask? It's that our approach to education (and policies across the board) need to change in order to compete in the 21st Century. Education needs to stay ahead of the change instead of consistently lagging behind.
We, as a global society, need to consider not only how our physical neighbors will fare in this change, but how the rest of the increasingly connected world will as well. I'm weaving in my personal interpretation here, but I have a feeling that the producers would agree.
Maybe I shouldn't even make this comparison. Dora the Explorer is certainly Spanish-lite and not necessarily a good teaching tool. The rush to teach Chinese is hardly subsiding across the world and in the United States. However, while it seems that many parents, educators, and even the government are on board, instructional materials are lacking.
Where are the quality instructional materials for learning Chinese, especially for children? Do they cost too much to produce? Possibly. But, come on, if we can't do it cheaply in China with Chinese, where can we do it. I would love to see a company get its foot in the door in this area. I see nothing but growth in this area in the coming decades. If done right, you could just modify the script for any language that you want to teach to. Sending it to France? Change it from English to French. It would just take a couple studio hours to record the French speaker.
A friend of mine recently sent me this video that is a fun introduction to some words in Chinese (Mandarin), though it could just as easily be for Mandarin speakers learning English. I think that it's a great production. If used in conjunction with other materials and possibly a teacher (online or face-to-face), it could be extremely motivating and effective.
Imagine a program like this that grew with students. They could start with the basics and advance as their students advanced. They could go beyond vocabulary learning and branch into learning culture, critical literacy, and so forth. A program like this would cost to start, but the long tail on something like this would provide revenue for many, many years. Not to mention, the first ones into the schools will stay in the schools.
Now that I'm talking about it, I wonder if I could carry it out. Unfortunately, I lack both the production abilities for this sort of animation and the Chinese speakers. Oh, well. I hope that this gives one of you the impetus to check it out.
Vicki Davis passes on some great resources and often adds unique insights to them. This is one of those postings. I'll embed the video below, but I encourage you to check out the link above to see her questions. They are a great conversation starter.
Hi all. This is a survey that Curt Bonk is conducting on the use of YouTube in education/training. It's a quick (10 min) survey that includes watching 1 short education/tech-related video. Go help him and fill it out.
You can help me too. If you refer someone, you get some free time in the pro account for SurveyShare, so drop my email address in there (danielcraig@hotmail.com).
Nice lesson plan and a good way to get feedback on your lesson plans. Put them up on your blog and ask people their opinions of the lesson plan. You'll notice that someone commented on this the next day saying that they already used it.
These are fun videos. It's like mini-science fiction documentaries. This is just for fun, but I think that you'll like it.
This is another video that predicts global domination for Google, through the purchase of all competitors. Like I said before, these are fun, but hardly believable....though, who knows?
I'm obviously on a video roll today :) I think that this is the same guy behind the other videos. This one is a very different format (TV news editorial), but just as effective.
For those of you who don't know about Net Neutrality, this is a good explanation. I won't get too much into it, because I don't want to politicize the class, but this is a good (very biased) introduction.
Another video by the "Plain English" folks. This one is about Wikis. While I'm not sure that this approach makes the concept easier, it's nice to watch :)
Ok, this is one of those infotainment pieces, but I thought that it was just too cool not to pass on. It is a video about the way that technology is changing how we interact with information and each other.
This is a fast-paced piece that takes quite a bit of concentration to process. Follow the typing text on the screen. The score is purely for emotional effect, but I liked that too.
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