Welcome to the wonderful world of video editing. Here are a series of starter guides to help you on your journey.
Adobe Captivate & Adobe Presenter
To truly create e-learning content that is meaniful and lasting you will need to utilise applications that are a bit more powerful than general apps. Two programs like this are Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter. Even though both of these programs have huge scope and posibilities, they have many levels of user ability and very easy to use entry levels.
Adobe Presenter allows you to take a PowerPoint presentation and add in interactivity, create quizes, monitor learning and much more. Watch the short video below to learn some of it’s capabilities.
With very little instruction you will be able to create effective e-learning content that can be accessed on any manner of devices.
Taking this e-learning content creation further, we move to Captivate. At first glance Presenter and Captivate may appear similar, however Captivate also allows you to capture screen content to create simulations and instructional videos.
To better understand how Captivate can be used by educators watch these series of videos below.
For any educator who wants to engage their students and create meaningful learning experiences I would whole-heartedly recommend getting a hold of Captivate and/or Presenter and to start using it this year. If you need some further guidance in using either of these programs you can find some more tutorials here:
Finally, for those of you who do want to learn much more about Captivate right away here are a series of videos that explore most of its capabilities in depth.
SlideShare
It’s all well and good putting together a presentation or other professional content, but how do you reach the greatest audience once it is created? Furthermore, from a teacher’s perspective, how do you ensure content that you present in class is available for review and any absent students?
Luckily, SlideShare comes to your aid.
SlideShare began with a simple goal: To share knowledge online. Since then, SlideShare has grown to become the world’s largest community for sharing presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. In 2013, the site averaged 60 million unique visitors a month and 215 million page views. SlideShare is among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world.Need further convincing? Watch this video
Give SlideShare a go today and see how effective it can be in your classroom.
Prezzi
For teachers (and students) that have seen way too many static powerpoint presentations Prezi offers a fresh way of conveying the information. In a nutshell, Prezi is a flash-based presentation system that allows you to create incredibly dynamic presentations. Presentations where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), create motion paths to lead you through a story, embed images and video and do things that previously needed a pretty competent flash developer and a whole chunk of time to do. It challenges traditional slide-based presentation software. And it is very, very easy to learn and use.
To find out more about Prezi and how it works take some time to go through these beginner’s tutorials.
Saving YouTube (and other videos)
At some point, we’ll all experience being sucked into the black hole that is YouTube. Minutes or hours can go by as you browse through videos uploaded by everyday people like you and me. Some are funny, others useful, or (believe it or not) thought-provoking. The problem is that often you will find an amazing educational resource and then when you go to show it to your class either:
a) the link has disappeared
b) the video takes too long to load and keeps ‘buffering’
c) the school’s Internet/network is not working.
The smarter way to operate is to download a version of the video file and store it locally so that you always have access.
Before I continue, note that policies for the many video Web sites vary, so review those policies and move forward at your own risk. Distributing copyrighted material without authorization is illegal in Australia and many other countries. I do not encourage or condone the illegal duplication or distribution of copyrighted content. Before copying or distributing any content online, make sure you have the legal right to do so.
Keeping that in mind, here are two websites that let you download video from just about any video-sharing site.
Clip Converter is a free online media conversion application, which allows you to record, convert and download nearly any audio or video URL to common formats. Currently supported services: YouTube (HQ, HD, 4K), Vimeo and many more. This free and fast converter allows you to save lesson resources so they are available when you need them.
One note of caution, although this is an excellent site for converting and saving video some of the advertisments placed in the sidebars of this site are ‘questionable’ so use some discretion when you are visiting this site.
KeepVid Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more. All you need is the URL of the page that has the video you want to download. Enter it in their textbox and simply click ‘Download‘. KeepVid will then fetch download links in all possible formats that the particular site provides. KeepVid is a little bit more cumbersome but it is a good backup plan if Clip Converter is not getting results.
Evernote
Evernote is a web program and app that allows anyone to collect ideas and put them in one place where they are then accessible through a browser, smartphone or tablet.
Evernote’s power lies in the fact that you can add text, audio, photos, video as well as clip web content. Your words, images, and documents are always close at hand. Evernote’s powerful search and discovery features make everything you’ve collected easy to find.
Get started with evernote here
If you still need more convincing watch this short video below.
ABC Splash
ABC Splash is a portal for teachers and students run by ABC broadcasting. It contain a vast collection of catalogued resources including videos, articles, games, digibooks, audio and links to other websites.
It is categorised by subject and Year level so it is fairly easy to find highly appropriate resources without too much fuss. To find your way to splash, follow this link.