5 Tools for Adding Questions and Notes to Videos

A teacher recently emailed me because she was searching for some tools that she could use to add questions and clarifying notes to videos that she shares with her students. These are the options that I suggested.

YouTube has a built-in tool for adding annotations to videos that you own. Open the video editor in your YouTube account and you can add notes, including notes with hyperlinks to other videos, to your videos. Directions for that process are available here.

On VideoANT anyone can add annotations to any publicly accessible YouTube video. To do this copy the URL of a video and paste it into the VideoANT annotation tool. Then as the video plays click the "add annotation" button when you want to add an annotation. To have others annotate the video with you, send them the VideoANT link. You are the only person that has to have a VideoANT account. Your collaborators do not need to have a VideoANT account to participate in the annotation process with you.

eduCanon is an excellent service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows you to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Once you have found a video through eduCanon you can add questions to it at any point along its timeline. Students need to answer your questions before they move on to the next portion of your chosen video. You can track your students' progress within eduCanon.

VideoNotes is a neat tool for taking notes while watching videos. VideoNotes allows you to load any YouTube video on the left side of your screen and on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad to type on. VideoNotes integrates with your Google Drive account. By integrating with Google Drive VideoNotes allows you to share your notes and collaborate on your notes just as you can do with a Google Document. You can use VideoNotes to have students submit questions to you and each other while watching videos. Of course, you can insert questions into the conversation for your students to answer too.

Blubbr is a neat quiz creation service that I have raved about since I tried it for the first time nearly three years ago. Through Blubbr you can create interactive quizzes that are based on YouTube clips. Your quizzes can be about anything of your choosing. The structure of the quizzes has a viewer watch a short clip then answer a multiple choice question about the clip. Viewers know right away if they chose the correct answer or not.

New Features Added to Google Drive for iOS 8

Google Drive users who have updated to iOS 8 on their iPads will find some helpful new features in the latest update to the Google Drive iPad app. The latest update to the app enables you to open files in Drive and save them back to Drive even when you're using other apps to create and edit. The other productivity update allows you to move video files from Google Drive to your iPad's camera roll.

From a security standpoint, the latest update to Google Drive for iPad enables the use of Touch ID. You can use Touch ID to lock the Google Drive for iPad app.

Applications for Education
These features aren't game-changing updates, but they could be helpful from a workflow standpoint. Your students can now open and work with files that weren't originally created in Drive on their iPads.

Ebola Explained Visually

My home state of Maine has been in the news quite a bit during the last couple of weeks because of the state government's effort to impose a quarantine on Kaci Hickox. How is ebola spread? What does it do to humans? Those questions and more are answered in the following video, The Ebola Virus Explained. For even more resources on ebola, see this of resources curated by Larry Ferlazzo.

H/T to Open Culture for the video. 

Now You Can Use Haiku Deck Within SlideShare

Haiku Deck is a fantastic tool for creating slideshows on your iPad or in your web browser. Today, Haiku Deck announced that you can now use their slideshow creation tool within SlideShare. This integration allows you to create slideshows within your SlideShare account. All of the features that you would find in Haiku Deck's web app are include in the SlideShare version of the app. Your completed slideshows are automatically published in your SlideShare account. You can choose to make your slideshows public or private in your SlideShare account.

If you haven't tried Haiku Deck's web app, take a look at my short tutorial video here.

Applications for Education
There are two features of Haiku Deck that stand-out in classroom settings. First, Haiku Deck offers an integrated Creative Commons image search tool. That image search allows your students to find images to use in their presentations without having to exit the app to search for images. Second, Haiku Deck limits the amount of text that students can place on each slide.

Haiku Deck's new integration with SlideShare allows you and your students to quickly share your presentations with each other and the world. Click here to try Haiku Deck within SlideShare.