Wakelet is an excellent tool for creating collections of bookmarks, notes, and files to share with your students. It has has a built-in video creation tool in the form of a Flipgrid integration. That integration allows you to create videos with your webcam, by recording your screen, by recording on a virtual whiteboard, or a combination of those options. You can record short instructional videos by recording with your webcam and the virtual whiteboard within Wakelet. In this short video I demonstrate how to do that.
Applications for Education
You can use Wakelet's Flipgrid integration to create short instructional videos that you add to a collection of resources in Wakelet. Consider creating collections based on topics or units of instruction to make it easier for students to quickly find the help resources that they need when working on a homework or other assignment.
Students can also use Wakelet's Flipgrid integration to create instructional videos. I'd consider having students make short instructional videos to demonstrate their understanding of a problem solving process. I'd also consider having students make instructional videos to talk about and teach a lesson on topics their passionate about outside of school.
Last week Canvalaunched a new online video editing studio. I gave it a try last week and recorded a short overview of the basics of how it works. Yesterday, I spent more time diving into all of the features within Canva's video editor and found some gems. One of those gems is the ability to edit and combine stock animation clips within the frames of a larger video project.
Canva has always had a large collection of free animated GIFs and animated video clips to add to graphics. Now you can trim those clips, combine them, and duplicate them in Canva's video editor. Doing that provides an easy way to make an animated video. The video editor will also let you add audio to accompany the animations that you combine in Canva. Watch this short demonstration to see how I made a short animated video with Canva's new video editor studio.
Applications for Education
Creating an animated video with stock footage from Canva's gallery could be a good way for students to bring their writing to life. Another way to think about using this is to have students create animations to illustrate science concepts in a manner similar to PhET simulations. Canva is designed for online collaboration and so students can work in pairs to edit their videos together.
Back in July I published a series of videos and blog posts detailing what you need to know to get started using Google Classroom, Drive, Docs, Slides, and Forms in your classroom (those are linked below). Of course, Google had to make some updates to Google Forms right at the start of the new school year and in doing so added some more functionality to Google Forms while also moving the location of some settings menus. That's why I recorded a new overview of Google Forms quiz settings.
Last week Google Arts & Culture published a great online exhibit titled Walk the Great Wall. It's a fantastic colleciton of Street View imagery and multimedia stories about the Great Wall of China. As I wrote last week, Walk the Great Wall includes detailed imagery of the bricks of the wall, short lessons about the construction of the Great Wall, stories of myths and legends of the Great Wall, and lots of imagery of the Great Wall from end to end in all four seasons of the year.
The only "problem" with the Walk the Great Wall Google Arts & Culture exhibit is that it is so large that if you want all your students to look at a specific section of it all at once, you have to share individual sections with your students instead of the whole exhibit. Fortunately, Google does make it relatively easy to share just a section of a Google Arts & Culture exhibit with your students. In this new video I demonstrate exactly how to do that.
Applications for Education
Sharing a specific section of a Google Arts & Culture exhibit is a good way to get all of your students looking at and discussing an element of an exhibit at the same time. Alternatively, you could assign different sections of an exhibit to groups of students then have them share observations with the whole class.
The method that I demonstrated in the video can also be used with other learning management systems. Simply get the sharing link from the section of the exhibit that you want to share and then manually paste it into an assignment in your LMS instead of using the Google Classroom button.
Good morning from Vermont where in a few hours I'll be riding in my last bike race of the year, The Hibernator. I still have fitness goals to reach this (riding 7,500 miles in 2021 is the big one), but this is my last event of the year and it looks like the weather is going to be a typical northern New England mix of clouds, drizzle, and a large temperature swing during the day. It should be fun! I hope that you have something fun planned for your weekend as well.
Before I head out on my bike I have this week's list of the most popular posts of the week to share with you. Take a look and see if there's something new or interesting that you missed during the week.
The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
My YouTube channel has more than 38,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fourteen years.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
