How to Quickly Turn a Blog Post Into a Video

Last week I published 5 Ways to Create Social Videos. In that post I included a neat tool called Lumen5 that can be used to turn blog posts or any other written text that you own into a video.

In the video below you'll see that Lumen5 takes the text of your article and breaks into small chunks to be displayed on slides. Lumen5 then automatically detects keywords in those chunks of text and adds corresponding images to the slides. Finally, music is added to the video. You can override any of the automatic selections that Lumen5 makes.


Applications for Education
Lumen5 could be useful for taking your written school announcements and having them quickly turned into a video to distribute on your school's website and or social media accounts.

Lumen5 might also be a neat tool for students to use to see a visualization of the short stories or persuasive essays that they write.

Oshi - File Sharing With an Expiration Date

Oshi is a free file sharing service that doesn't require you to create an account in order to host and share small files. What makes Oshi interesting is that you can set an expiration date for the files that you share through the service. You can set files to expire after an hour, a day, three days, seven days, thirty days, or ninety days. You can also set your file sharing link to expire after someone has downloaded your file.

While Oshi is designed for temporary hosting and sharing of your files, it is possible to extend the life of a hosted file. If you do need to extend the life of your hosted file, you can do that by hitting the manage button on your files.

A little quirk of Oshi that I noticed in my testing is that it works better in the latest version of Firefox than in it does in the latest version of Chrome.

Applications for Education
Oshi could be useful for sharing things like pictures from a school event that you want to make available to parents but don't want to put online indefinitely.