How to Quickly Turn a Blog Post Into a Video

Last week I published 5 Ways to Create Social Videos. In that post I included a neat tool called Lumen5 that can be used to turn blog posts or any other written text that you own into a video.

In the video below you'll see that Lumen5 takes the text of your article and breaks into small chunks to be displayed on slides. Lumen5 then automatically detects keywords in those chunks of text and adds corresponding images to the slides. Finally, music is added to the video. You can override any of the automatic selections that Lumen5 makes.


Applications for Education
Lumen5 could be useful for taking your written school announcements and having them quickly turned into a video to distribute on your school's website and or social media accounts.

Lumen5 might also be a neat tool for students to use to see a visualization of the short stories or persuasive essays that they write.

Oshi - File Sharing With an Expiration Date

Oshi is a free file sharing service that doesn't require you to create an account in order to host and share small files. What makes Oshi interesting is that you can set an expiration date for the files that you share through the service. You can set files to expire after an hour, a day, three days, seven days, thirty days, or ninety days. You can also set your file sharing link to expire after someone has downloaded your file.

While Oshi is designed for temporary hosting and sharing of your files, it is possible to extend the life of a hosted file. If you do need to extend the life of your hosted file, you can do that by hitting the manage button on your files.

A little quirk of Oshi that I noticed in my testing is that it works better in the latest version of Firefox than in it does in the latest version of Chrome.

Applications for Education
Oshi could be useful for sharing things like pictures from a school event that you want to make available to parents but don't want to put online indefinitely.

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.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where the sun is rising and it's a balmy 10F outside. This is the last weekend of my school vacation week so I'm planning to get outside to play for a bit more. I spent part of the week working on some long-term projects. But it wasn't all work all week as I did spend the first couple of days of vacation ice fishing on Moosehead lake with a group of teachers that I've known for almost twenty years now. Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you have time to do something fun too.

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Animate Anything With Cloud Stop Motion
2. 5 Google Slides Features New Users Should Know - Updated
3. Write Faster With These Two New Google Docs Features
4. Quickly Turn Articles Into Videos With InVideo
5. Convert PDF to Word and More
6. The Practical Ed Tech Podcast - Episode 32 - Back from the Flu
7. DNS & IP Explained

2020 Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp!
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I'll come to your school in 2020! 
Send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more about how we can work together. This year I'm offering an opportunity to bring me to your school for free! Ask me for details.

Thank You for Your Support!

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Other Places to Follow My Work

Besides FreeTech4Teachers.com and the daily email digest, there are other ways to keep up with what I'm publishing. 

• Practical Ed Tech Newsletter - This comes out once per week (Sunday night/ Monday morning) and includes my tip of the week and a summary of the week's most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com.
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• Twitter - I've been Tweeting away for the last twelve years at twitter.com/rmbyrne
• Instagram - this is mostly pictures of my kids, my dogs, my bikes, my skis, and fly fishing.

Four Videos Explaining Leap Year

This year is a Leap Year and Leap Day is just a week away. Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo I recently learned about this new video from Homeschool Pop that explains Leap Year to kids.


Here are three other video explanations of Leap Year. These were all featured on this blog for the last Leap Year.