How to Edit the Captions on Your YouTube Videos

This morning on Twitter I was asked about the possibility of editing the captions that are automatically generated by the Google Slides captioning tool. The question was raised by Michelle Joyce in response to my blog post about using the Google Slides captions and Screencast-o-matic to create flipped video lessons. While you can't edit the captions that Google Slides generates, as Tammy Aiello pointed out, you can edit captions in YouTube. That inspired me to create a video to demonstrate how to edit the captions that are automatically generated for your YouTube videos.

How to Use Adobe Spark to Create Videos

Since the first day that it launched two and a half years ago, I knew that Adobe Spark would be a great tool for students to use to create videos. Like any good product it has evolved over the last couple of years by adding more features without eliminating the core features. Some of the outstanding features of Adobe Spark include an integrated image search, a simple voiceover capability, and the option to insert and edit existing videos for inclusion in a bigger project.

This morning I made an updated version of my Adobe Spark video tutorial to replace the popular one that I published a couple of years ago. My new Adobe Spark video tutorial is embedded below. You can also watch it on my YouTube channel.




Learn more about classroom video projects in my upcoming Practical Ed Tech course, Video Projects for Every Classroom.

How to Add Videos to Google Slides Without Using YouTube

This morning I received an email from a reader who wanted to know if it was possible for his students to add their personal videos to Google Slides presentations without having to use YouTube. His plan is for students to collaborate to create a Google Slides presentation about a 4-H event and he wants students to include some personal video clips from it. But while his school allows the use of YouTube, he'd prefer to avoid having to make students use it. My suggestion was to have students save their videos in their Google Drive and then insert them directly into their slides. That's what I demonstrate in the following video that I recorded this morning.


If you have questions about Google Slides or other G Suite products, please feel free to send me a note. And if you're new to using G Suite, consider joining my Practical Ed Tech course Getting Going With G Suite.

120 Free Winter-themed Reading Lesson Plans

ReadWorks is an excellent service that provides teachers with free reading lesson plans. ReadWorks offers lesson plans that can be used in classrooms from Kindergarten through 12th grade. All of the lessons are standards-aligned. And if you don't want to use ReadWorks' lesson plans, you can simply use any of their thousands of fiction and non-fiction articles to design your own lessons. You can search through ReadWorks according to topic and grade level. All articles in ReadWorks are listed with a lexile score and suggested grade level.

ReadWorks recently published a selection of articles and lesson plans that have a winter and or holiday theme. The winter/ holiday collection on ReadWorks contains 120 articles for K-12. In the collection there are articles that have connections to topics in science, social studies, and language arts. All articles are accompanied by lists of key vocabulary terms and suggested comprehension and or discussion questions.

Applications for Education
ReadWorks makes it easy to find interesting and engaging articles to use in reading lesson plans. You can use the articles on paper or take advantage of the ReadWorks digital platform to create class rosters and assign articles to your students to read online. For the 2018-19 school year ReadWorks added a Google Classroom integration for distributing articles and comprehension questions to your students.

Coming Soon to PowerPoint - Real-time Captions and Translations

Earlier this year Google added automatic captioning to Google Slides. This week, via The Verge, I learned that Microsoft is adding automatic captioning and translation to  PowerPoint starting in January. The automatic captioning will work when you are displaying your slides in presentation mode. You will have a choice of languages in which to display captions.


Applications for Education
One huge advantage of PowerPoint's automatic captioning service over Google Slide's automatic captions is that PowerPoint's support multiple languages and real-time translation display. This could be a fantastic resource for ELL/ESL classrooms. If you can't wait to give PowerPoint's automatic captioning a try, you can still use Microsoft Translator for Education.