Three Ways to Create Year-in-Review Videos

It is the time of year when just about every media company is publishing a year-in-review video. Those year-in-review videos will cover everything from the top news stories of the year to celebrity gossip stories to memorials for famous people who died in 2016. Asking students to create year-in-review videos can be a good way for them to recall their best moments of the year or to recall the most important news stories of the year. Students could use the following free tools to create year-in-review videos.

Just last week Adobe Spark added the option for students to include video samples in the videos they make in Adobe Spark. Previously, the videos students made in Adobe Spark could only include text, pictures, music, and voice-over audio. Now students can include video clips and record voice-overs on those clips. Adobe Spark is a good choice for creating year-in-review videos because students can record voice-overs to explain the significance of each image or video clip that they use to summarize the year. A simple formula for students to follow is to have them add one image or video clip for each month of the year. Learn how to use Adobe Spark by watching this tutorial.

Update 2020: Sharalike is no longer available. 
Sharalike is a good option to consider when you want to create an audio slideshow. To create an audio slideshow on Sharalike simply import some images from your computer, your Android device or from your iPad, drag them into the sequence in which you want them to appear, and then add some music. Sharalike offers a small collection of stock music that you can use or you can upload your own music.


Finally, YouTube offers some good video creation and editing tools that most people overlook. One of those tools allows you to combine video clips to make one longer video. You can combine your own videos and or use video clips from YouTube's gallery of Creative Commons licensed videos. So while your students aren't limited to just their videos, they also just can't grab any old video from YouTube, like this chart-topper, to include in their projects.

You can learn more about how to use YouTube's overlooked features this Wednesday in YouTube, It's Not Just Cats & Khan Academy. 

Three Ways to Create Multimedia Year-in-Review Timelines

The year is almost over and for many of us this is a time to look back at the year. Creating a year-in-review is a great way to celebrate our successes and learn from our failures. Creating a multimedia timeline is one way that your students can structure a year-in-review. They can make personal year-in-review timelines or make a timeline to review the biggest news stories of the year. The following three tools all provide a good way to create multimedia timelines.

The History Project provides a fantastic platform for creating personal year-in-review timelines. The History Project lets you upload your own pictures or import pictures from social networks to add to your timeline. Each event on your timeline can include multiple pictures. After adding a picture to a timeline event you can record audio to add to that event. You also have the option to upload an existing audio recording. Of course, like any good time tool, The History Project lets you write in notes, dates, and locations. When you write in a location a Google Map of that location is added to your timeline event. A video overview of The History Project can be seen on my YouTube channel.

Timeline JS offers nearly unlimited flexibility for including media in a timeline. Timeline JS timelines can include pictures, videos, audio files, and maps. Students can collaborate on the creation of multimedia timelines published through Timeline JS. The video embedded below provides an overview of how to use Timeline JS.


Read Write Think's timeline creation tool is a great choice for elementary school settings. Students don't have to create accounts in order to use the tool. It can be used on Chromebooks, laptops of all varieties, iPads, and Android tablets. The only limitation to it is that students can only use pictures and text in their timelines.



More ideas and directions for developing and using multimedia timelines will be shared in Teaching History With Technology starting in January.