How to Quickly Turn a Podcast Into a Video

Earlier this month I shared Headliner as an alternative to using Adobe Spark to make videos. One of the features of Headliner that I didn't share in that post was their tool for turning podcast episodes into videos.

In Headliner there is a tool for taking any podcast episode and having a video based on its audio automatically created for you. It only takes a couple of minutes and it works with just about any public podcast. Watch my short video that is embedded below to learn how to use Headliner to turn a podcast into a video.


Applications for Education
If you have students who are producing podcasts for your class, using Headliner to make videos based on those podcasts could be a good way to increase the distribution options for those episodes.

5 Ways to Create Social Videos

Yesterday, I wrote about a new video creation tool called InVideo. InVideo is one of many tools to emerge in the last couple years that is designed to help users create eye-catching videos to post on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. These videos use a mix of images and text to grab your attention and quickly tell a short story. Most include music, but can also be effective even when the music is turned off. If you're using social media to share school or classroom announcements, you might want to try making social media videos. Here are five tools worth trying for making social media videos.

Lumen 5
Lumen5 is a service that will produce a video for you based upon your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or paste in the text of your blog post. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. Lumen5 generates a preview of a video for you based on the title, keywords, and key phrases in your blog post. The video will consist of images and video clips matched to the words in your blog post.Completed Lumen5 projects can be shared directly to Facebook. You can also download your video to use on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and anywhere else that you like post short videos.

Canva
Canva offers tons of templates for making social media graphics. One of the overlooked options for sharing Canva graphics is exporting as MP4. In the following video I demonstrate how to create a video with Canva.



Adobe Spark
Like Canva, Adobe Spark offers a lot of templates for making social media graphics. Adobe Spark also offers a dedicated video editor for making videos. You can make a video from scratch or use one of the templates that is designed specifically for posting on social media.



Sharalike
Sharalike is a simple video creation tool that is available as a browser-based tool as well as an Android app and iOS app. All three versions let you bulk upload/ import a collection of pictures then drag and drop those pictures into the sequence in which you want them to appear. Once you've arranged your images you can add music from Sharalike's library of free, royalty-free music. Sharalike will then create the video for you. I've successfully uploaded as many as 45 pictures at once to Sharalike to make a video. The only downside to Sharalike is that you can't download your video, you have to watch it online.



Headliner
Headliner is an online video creation tool that offers templates designed for creating videos to share on social media. Headliner also offers a neat service that will turn your spoken audio or podcast files into video files. Headliner offers their pro version to schools for free.

Headliner - A Good Alternative to Adobe Spark Video

In the last episode of the Practical Ed Tech Podcast I answered the following question from a reader,

"I was wondering if I may ask for a suggestion/recommendation. I have some eighth grade students creating videos incorporating music. I'd prefer not to use adobe spark because I don't want the adobe logo on each slide. What would you suggest? Their devices are managed by the school so it needs to be a free app that I can push out."

My answer to the question was to take a look at Headliner. Headliner is a browser-based video editor. It has more editing features than Adobe Spark but not quite as many as WeVideo. Headliner provides four tracks for editing the pictures, video clips, text, and audio files that you use to create your videos. There is an integrated audio library as well as integrated image search tool. There is also a tool for adding and editing captions in your videos.

Headliner provides its "pro" version for free to schools. The pro version removes all watermarks. Finished videos can be saved without watermarks for free.

Headliner - A Slick Online Video Editor

Headliner is an online video editing tool that could challenge Adobe Spark and WeVideo for the top of my recommended video tools list. I just learned about Headliner from their PR person this afternoon. 99% of the PR emails that I'm sent are useless (seriously, I got one today about lawn fertilizer), but the one I got about Headliner is in the 1% of useful PR emails.

Headliner is a free online video editor that was designed for the purpose of making videos for use on social media, but the editor could be used for making videos for any purpose. To get started using Headliner you do need to create a free account on the site. Once you've created an account you can begin making videos from scratch or by following one of the simple templates in Headliner. Using the blank template is probably the best way to get to know the features built into the Headliner editor.

The first time that you open a blank project in Headliner you might think that you have to upload audio to start. That's because Headliner displays a prompt to upload audio as soon as you open the editor. I found that you don't have to actually upload audio to get started. Instead of adding audio to start you can import pictures, use the built-in image search tool, import video, or use the built-in video search tool. Once you have imported media you can adjust the duration of display, add pan and zoom effects, insert transition effects, and add text to the video. Of course, you can also add audio to the video at any time.

Completed Headliner projects can be downloaded as MP4 files, embedded into blog posts and webpages, or shared on social media.

Applications for Education
Headliner could be a great video creation tool for high school students to use to make short documentary-style videos. While it is relatively easy to use, making a short documentary in Headliner would require a good bit of advanced planning and patience in editing images, video clips, text, and audio into one polished final product.