Three Ways to Collaboratively Create Video Playlists

From cats doing tricks to documentaries about cats in Egyptian art, we watch more videos today than we ever have before. The challenge is weeding through all of the ridiculous cat videos to find the good stuff that you can share with your students. And once you find the good videos, you'll want to organize them into playlists. That process can be easier if you collaborate with colleagues or enlist the help of your students. Here are three ways to collaboratively create video playlists.

Collaboratively Create YouTube Playlists
There is a built-in collaboration option in YouTube. Watch my video below to see how to use it.




Create a Playlist on Padlet
Break away from reliance on YouTube and create a playlist on a Padlet wall. Your playlist created on a Padlet wall can include videos from just about any public video hosting site. Learn more in my video below.



Google Slides
Start a slideshow in Google Slides and invite others to collaborate on it with you. Add a video to each slide. Videos can be added from YouTube or from Google Drive. By inserting from Google Drive you can include videos that you own that haven't been displayed elsewhere. Watch my video below to learn how to insert videos from Google Drive into your Google Slides.


Join my G Suite for Teachers course to learn many more ways to use Google Slides in your classroom. 

The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter

Over the years I have had the good fortune of having tens of thousands of educators like you subscribe to the Free Technology for Teachers daily email newsletter. Many people forward it to their colleagues on a regular basis too. But for some people a daily email leads to information overload. That's why I created the Practical Ed Tech Newsletter.

For many years people asked if there was a way to get an email just once a week instead of daily so I created the Practical Ed Tech Newsletter. The newsletter is sent on Sunday evening (or Monday depending upon your timezone). In it you will find my favorite educational technology tip of the week along with links to the seven most popular posts of the week from Free Technology for Teachers. Nearly 15,000 people read the newsletter every week.

Click here to subscribe to the Practical Ed Tech Newsletter today and you’ll be on the list to receive the next issue this weekend.

How Your Digestive System Works - A TED-Ed Lesson

How Your Digestive System Works is a new TED-Ed lesson. Like all TED-Ed lessons the graphics in the video are great. The content itself is rather basic and best suited for a middle school science classroom. If you want to extend the lesson I would recommend taking a look at Sponge Lab Biology's Interactive Build a Body.

On Sponge Lab Biology's Interactive Build a Body students assemble systems within the human body. Have your students try to correctly assemble the digestive system after watching the TED-Ed lesson about the digestive system.

Screencast-O-Matic for Chromebooks

Screencast-O-Matic is my favorite screen recording tool to use on my Windows and Mac computers. Last night I discovered that it can now be used on Chromebooks too!

Screencast-O-Matic is currently offering a public beta of their Chrome app. To use Screencast-O-Matic on your Chromebook you will need to go to this page while on your Chromebook, click launch recorder, install the Chrome app when prompted, and then start recording your screen. 

Screencast-O-Matic on a Chromebook will let you record for up to fifteen minutes per video. You can include your own narration as well as sounds from your Chromebook in your screencasts. Completed videos can be saved to Chromebook or saved directly to Google Drive.

If you're not up for trying a beta product on your Chromebook, you can use one of these six other ways to create screencast videos on your Chromebook.

How to Embed Flipgrid Videos Into Your Blog

On Sunday I featured Flipgrid in my tip of the week. My video tutorial on getting started with Flipgrid included how to share your video prompts with students and how they can reply to your prompts. One method of sharing that I didn't include in Sunday's video was embedding Flipgrid videos into blog posts.

You can embed Flipgrid videos into blog posts in two ways. You can embed a "fully functional topic" into your blog or you can embed just a "topic card." Embedding a "fully functional topic" requires that your blog has an SSL certificate which most classroom blogs don't have. Embedding a "topic card" can be done on any blog that allows you to include third-party embed codes. Once you've embedded a topic card, your students can watch all of the videos that are connected to the same prompt that you posted. Watch my following video to learn how to embed Flipgrid videos into your blog.


It's important to note that you will have to make the videos public in order for them to be viewable when embedded as part of a topic card.