3 New Ways to Find Free Technology for Teachers

One of the things that has always confused some folks when I or others give them the url for this blog is the fact that I used the number 4 in the url. Often people hear the name Free Technology for Teachers and type that into their browser bars as the url for the site. If you did that in the past you would get a parked domain page. But, as of very early this morning you can now reach Free Technology for Teachers by entering freetech4teachers.com, freetechforteachers (dot) com, freetechnologyforteachers (dot) com, and free-tech-4-teachers (dot) com into your browser.

Interview with Rushton Hurley from Next Vista

This morning I sat down with Rushton Hurley to talk about his non-profit video service, Next Vista. I've written about Next Vista in the past (you can read about it here), but in a nutshell Next Vista offers a human reviewed catalog of user-generated videos. Watch the video below to hear directly from Rushton about Next Vista. Make sure you watch to the end to hear about how a video project got a disengaged middle school student engaged in the classroom.

Downloading Videos for Use In the Classroom

Disclaimer: Downloading content from YouTube can be interpreted as a violation of it's terms of service. Back in November 2009 I surveyed readers for their opinions as to whether or not teachers should download content from YouTube. The survey results indicate that most teachers would download YouTube content, but there were also some very passionate comments against that action. You can read the post and the subsequent comments here.

I am very fortunate to work in a school district that allows teachers to access YouTube videos. For now my district is the exception to the rule, but hopefully in the future more schools will allow access to YouTube at least at the high school level. The quantity of good, educational content on YouTube is far greater than the quantity available on any other site. If you work in a district that blocks YouTube, there are still ways that you can use YouTube content in your classroom. Here are some tools you can use to download YouTube videos for use on your local hard drive.

Catch YouTube is a free tool for converting and downloading YouTube videos. Catch YouTube offers eight formats for video conversion. The video conversions are fairly quick depending on the length of the video.

Convert My Tube is a free service that allows you to convert a video to your choice of eight different formats for use on your local hard drive. To use Convert My Tube, simply enter the url of the video you want converted, select your desired format, and then download the video.

YouTube Snips is another good tool for downloading YouTube videos for use offline. To use YouTube Snips simply enter the the url of your chosen video and download the video in your preferred format. YouTube Snips gives you the choice of three formats, MP4, 3GP, and FLV. In my test of YouTube Snips the download was very quick.

Miro is an open source media player available for Mac and Windows. Miro is kind of like iTunes for user generated video websites. After you install Miro you can download videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites directly from Miro. If there is a particular video producer that you like you can subscribe to the video channel. Each video is saved in your media player until you decide to delete it.

If you're not comfortable downloading videos from YouTube, you should try one of these 30+ Alternatives to YouTube. One of my absolute favorites from that list is Next Vista.