BubblePLY & Screenr

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.

VoiceThread

VoiceThread

This is a cool tool. You upload photos for a slideshow, then you can comment (audio or text) on each of the pictures. What's better, though, is that others can also comment.

Here is my sample (terrible production value, but I can work on that). It is a few pictures from a 4th of July parade. http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=5299&invite=4AbMIeWWvU.

I'd like to point out the URL above. You can share this slideshow with others, but it has to be make public to embed in a blog (external website). So, I created a friend (my other email) and "shared" the show with that friend. That led me to this URL. While I don't mind my presentation being public, I don't really want all users of that site to be dropping in and leaving messages. This would be particularly problematic if you were using this for a class. So, either get all of your students in your friends list, I do something like I described above so you can post a link to the content.

This could be a great tool to elicit iCBT-type test responses from your students, or other contributions of voice or text. While it does not work as a threaded discussion, you could have serial discussions through this medium, which is similar to what you get with most blog commenting features.

This might also be good for tutorials. Users could see a screenshot or other images and listen to or read the instructions/descriptions. I picture this as being good to use in one window with the software interface in another window (using audio puts less focus on the image, but it's there if they need it).

Dan