Three Tools for Quickly & Easily Creating End-of-Year Slideshow Videos

In my weekly newsletter I mentioned that a sure sign that the end of the school year is near always lands in my inbox as an uptick in the number of questions I get about saving and moving files. Another sign that the end of the school year is near is an increase in questions like this one that just landed in my inbox, 

I have taken a lot of pictures this year. I would like to put them into a slideshow with music for my students for the last day of school. What program do you recommend? Thank you.

If you're also thinking about making an end-of-year slideshow video for your students, here are a few tools that I recommend. 

Adobe Creative Cloud Express Video
Adobe Creative Cloud Express was previously known as Adobe Spark. I've been using it since its launch half a dozen years ago. Adobe Creative Cloud Express makes it easy for students to create succinct audio slideshow videos. It includes a library of background music that you can insert into your videos. Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud Express is a collaborative tool so you can invite a colleague to work on developing an end-of-year slideshow video with you. Watch this video to learn how to make a video with Adobe Creative Cloud Express.

Canva
Canva offers two ways to create audio slideshow videos. The first way is to simply put together a series of slides and then select a soundtrack to play in the background. That process is demonstrated here. The other method is to use Canva's full video editor to add narration and custom timings to an audio slideshow video. That process is demonstrated in this video.

Microsoft Photos
Microsoft Photos includes a video creation tool for making short audio slideshow-style videos. You'll find this by just opening the native photos app in Windows 10. Within the editor there are tools for adding animated effects to still images, insert your existing video clips into a video project, and tools for adding audio to your video. There's also a great option to search for Creative Commons licensed images and insert them directly into your video project. The best part of that feature is that attribution information is automatically added onto the images you choose through the built-in search tool. In the following video I provide a demonstration of how to create a video in Microsoft Photos in Windows 10.

How to Blur Faces in Videos With Screencastify

Screencastify is an excellent tool for quickly creating screencast videos. What you might not know is that you can also use Screencastify's free video editor to edit videos that you've recorded with other tools. For example, I recorded a video on my phone then transferred it to my laptop where I used Screencastify's free video editor to blur things in my video. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Screencastify's free video editor to blur faces and objects in your videos. 

Applications for Education
Blurring faces and objects in videos is a great way to protect students' privacy when sharing video clips online. By using the tools to selectively blur faces you can include the faces of the students who want to be seen in shared videos and blur the faces of those who don't want to appear in shared videos.

Type Studio - One of My New Favorites in 2021

I'm taking this week to recharge and get ready for the next session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. For the next few days I'm going to highlight some of my favorite new and new-to-me tools so far this year. 

Type Studio is a new video editing tool. When I used it for the first time yesterday I actually said aloud, "Whoa! That's Awesome!" What made me say that was using the editor to clip a section of video. With video editing tools you have to drag and select a section to delete it or enter time stamps of a section to delete it. In Type Studio I simply selected a few words from the transcript of my video and hit the delete key on my keyboard to remove a section of my video. 

After reading my first paragraph you might be saying, "that's great, but what if I don't have a transcript of my video?" Type Studio creates a transcript for you when you upload your video into their editor. Depending on the length of the video this can just a few minutes or can be quite a bit longer than that. Once the transcript is created it appears your Type Studio editor alongside your original video. Then to cut a section of your video all you have to do is select the words or sentences you want to remove and Type Studio will remove the corresponding section of the video itself. 

Type Studio currently supports fifteen languages. In addition to providing tools for clipping and cutting your videos, Type Studio provides a subtitling service. You could use Type Studio just to create subtitles and transcripts without having to actually do any editing of your video. 

Watch this short video to see how Type Studio works. 

Applications for Education

Type Studio isn't going to replace tools like WeVideo or iMovie, but that's not it's purpose. Where I think it fits into my toolbox is as a tool to quickly and accurately edit recordings of video lessons and recordings of things like lessons conducted in Zoom. It's a heck of a lot quicker and easier to delete a few words and have that section removed from my video than it is to go back into WeVideo or iMovie and try to find the exact right moments in the timeline to cut my video. 

Type Studio will also make it easy to quickly and accurately edit the transcripts and subtitles of the videos that I share with my students.