Wistia - A Great Video Hosting Platform

YouTube can be a good place to host videos that you and your students have made. However, that doesn't do you much good if your school blocks YouTube. Furthermore, YouTube can and will insert video over and or next your videos (that's the trade-off for a free service). If you want another place to host your videos, take a look at Wistia.

Wistia is a video hosting service designed for businesses, I use it to host my webinar recordings, but it does offer a free plan for new users. Wistia's free plan allows you to host up to 50 videos at a time. You can host HD videos and videos of nearly unlimited length. Wistia also provides a wide range of customizations that you can apply to your embedded videos.

Visit Wistia's learning center for tips on producing great videos.

An Overview of Important Basic YouTube Settings for Teachers

When it is used correctly YouTube can be a good platform for spreading news about the great things that are happening in our classrooms and schools. It can also be a good platform for students to share their thoughts and projects. But before you upload videos to YouTube there are a few settings that you should be aware of. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of those settings.

How to Embed Google Street View Imagery Into Your Blog Posts

This morning I received an email from someone who had seen my recent post about the Google Maps Street View Special Collections. She wanted to know how I was able to display the imagery and keep it interactive in my blog post. The quickest way to explain how to do that is to show it in a screencast video. That video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
As I pointed at the end of the video, embedded Street View imagery into a blog post is a good way to get all of your students to quickly look at the same geographic place. This is handy when you're pressed for time and or you want students to have blog-based discussion about a place.

Spring Timelapse - A Video Project

Last night I shared a post about using Project Noah to have students document the signs of the seasons. While I was walking my dogs this morning I remembered a project idea that I shared last fall. The idea was to create a timelapse video to document the signs of the change of seasons. The idea is to have students take one picture per day for a few weeks. Then at the end of a few weeks they can upload those images to a video editor like JellyCam, WeVideo, or iMovie to create a timelapse video.

1. Take one picture per day of the same view or of one singular plant. 
Using your cell phone is probably the best tool for this because we rarely go anywhere without one.

2. Upload the pictures to a Google Drive folder. 
It only takes one or two taps to move my photos from your phone to a Google Drive folder. If This Then That has a recipe for doing this automatically from Android phones and from iPhones.

3. After four to six weeks, upload photos to JellyCam and create your timelapse. 
JellyCam is a free video editing program for Windows and Mac users. You can easily adjust the duration of each frame and easily add a soundtrack to your video. Click here for a video about using JellyCam.

Lapse It is a timelapse video creation tool available for iPad and Android tablets.