Alternatives to Vialogues for Annotating Videos

Yesterday morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for some alternatives to Vialogues for annotating videos. Vialogues has been one of my go-to tools for students to use to take notes and share notes while watching a video that you share with them. Unfortunately, Vialogues is shutting down in May. If you find yourself looking for some alternatives, here are some options to consider. 

VideoAnt

By using VideoANT anyone can add annotations to any publicly accessible YouTube video. To do this copy the URL of a video and paste it into the VideoANT annotation tool. Then as the video plays click the "add annotation" button when you want to add an annotation. To have others annotate the video with you, just send them the VideoANT link. Here's a video of how it works. 

ReClipped
ReClipped is a neat tool that lets you take notes, share notes, and share clips from educational videos. With a ReClipped account you can clip sections of videos that you find on YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Coursera, and TED. In addition to clipping you can create time-stamped notes about the videos that you clip. A Pinterest-like aspect of ReClipped appears if you choose to share your clips and notes on a board. ReClipped boards can be shared publicly or kept private. Here's a demonstration of how ReClipped works.



Timelinely
Timelinely is a free service for adding annotations to YouTube videos. You can use Timelinely to add text, image, and video annotations to any public YouTube video. After you have added your annotations to a video you can share the annotated version with anyone much like you would share any other video. You can share your annotated video by embedding it into a blog post or by just giving people the link to the annotated version of the video. In the following video I demonstrate how to use Timelinely to annotate YouTube videos.



Bookmark It
Bookmark It is a free Chrome extension that can solve a problem many people face when trying to show students just a specific part of a video. That problem is having to scroll along the timeline of a YouTube video to find the spot that you want to share. Bookmark It lets you add timestamped bookmarks and notes to the timeline of a video. Once you've added your bookmarks and notes you can return directly to them from the Bookmark It extension. Watch my video that is embedded below to see how Bookmark It works.

VideoANT - Collaboratively Annotate Videos

VideoANT is a free tool for collaboratively annotating videos. I first wrote about VideoANT back in 2010. Recently, as I learned from Nathan Hall, VideoANT received a major facelift that makes it easier to use than it was before. The first improvement to note is that the service is now built on HTML5 which means that Flash is no longer needed. The second major improvement is improved ease of annotating videos.

Using VideoANT anyone can add annotations to any publicly accessible YouTube video. To do this copy the URL of a video and paste it into the VideoANT annotation tool. Then as the video plays click the "add annotation" button when you want to add an annotation. To have others annotate the video with you, send them the VideoANT link. You are the only person that has to have a VideoANT account. Your collaborators do not need to have a VideoANT account to participate in the annotation process with you.

Nathan Hall wrote a complete run-down of all of the features of VideoANT. He also posted a how-to video. I recommend reading his post and watching his video here.

Applications for Education
In the past I've used back-channels while my students are watching videos so that they can discuss the footage as they're seeing it. Annotating videos with Video ANT could take that process a step further by creating an archive that matches the various points in the footage.

Video ANT - Discuss and Annotate Videos

Video ANT is a free tool developed by Brad Hosack at the University of Minnesota for the purpose of providing a platform on which students and teachers view and annotate videos. Video ANT plays your specified video and while watching you and your students can and marks along a timeline and write comments alongside the video. Annotations are archived and emailed to you when you've completed the annotation process. Video ANT works with YouTube videos as well as with some video files that you can upload to the site. Click here to watch a screencast created by Brad Hosack of Video ANT in action.

Thanks to Desert Diver on Twitter for sharing this great resource along with a sample of one of his annotated Video ANT videos.

Applications for Education
In the past I've used back-channels while my students are watching videos so that they can discuss the footage as they're seeing it. Annotating videos with Video ANT could take that process a step further by creating an archive that matches the various points in the footage.

Viddler also allows you to annotate videos, but the drawback to Viddler is that you're somewhat limited as to the length of comments you can write. Also Viddler may be blocked in some schools. Video ANT provides a clean, easy-to-use interface in which you and your students can annotate and discuss videos.