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Annotate Videos and Images With These Free Tools

Adding annotations to videos or to images can be a good way for your students to show you what they are thinking as they view something. Their annotations could be general comments, answers to questions, or questions that they want to ask you.

Three Tools for Annotating Videos
ReClipped is a neat tool that lets you take notes, share notes, and share clips from educational videos. ReClipped blends the best aspects of TurboNote, VideoNot.es, and Pinterest into one slick system. 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. The 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. See ReClipped in action in this video.

TurboNote is a Chrome extension you can use to take notes while watching any video. To take notes students just need to click the TurboNote extension icon in their browsers and start writing notes in the menu that appears on the right side of the screen. Any notes that students type are automatically time-stamped. Notes can be edited while the video is playing or while the video is stopped. All notes can be shared via social media and email.

Timelinely is the newest of this type of tool for annotating videos that are hosted on YouTube. Timelinely makes it easy to get started. You just have to copy a YouTube URL into the Timelinely homepage to get started. Once you have entered the URL for a video, a new screen appears that allows you to add tags or annotations to the timeline of the video. You can do this while the video plays or you can simply jump to a place on the video to add annotations. Your annotations can include text or images.

Annotate Images
OneNote users can annotate images in the web, desktop, and mobile versions of OneNote. You can upload an image to a page in your notebook and then use the drawing and typing tools to write on top of the image. One of the neat things about the web and desktop versions of OneNote is that you can search the web for images right from your notebook.  When using the mobile version of OneNote you can add images by importing them from your phone’s camera roll or by taking a new picture with your phone’s camera.

Google Keep users can annotate images on their mobile phones and or in the browser-based version of Google Keep. In the browser-based version of Google Keep you have to import images. In the mobile version of Google Keep you can import from your camera roll or take a new picture with your camera. Watch my video below to see how you can annotate images in the browser-based version of Google Keep.

Pixorize is a free tool for adding interactive annotations to your images. Pixorize will only work in the web browser on a laptop or desktop computer. Using Pixorize is a fairly straight-forward process. To get started just upload any picture that you have saved on your computer. Once the image is uploaded you can add points, circles, squares, and stars as annotation markers on your image. After adding an annotation marker you can write text to explain the element of the image to which you are calling attention. To save and or share your work on Pixorize you must create an account. However, creating an account didn’t require validating your email address (I created an account with a fake email address that I have for one of my dogs). After saving your image on Pixorize you can share a link to it or embed it into a blog post

These were the week’s most popular posts on FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. The Library of Congress Seeks a Teacher-in-Residence
2. Three Free iPad Apps for Creating Animated Movies
3. Why I’ve Stopped Making My Public Google Docs Printable
4. Newspaper Templates for Google Docs & Word
5. Photos for Class Now Offers More Free Images for Students
6. 1766 Free Lesson Plans for Art Teachers
7. 5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom

On-demand Professional Development
I offer a number of on-demand professional development courses. The redesigned version of my popular Teaching History With Technology launched last week. That course is on sale this week at $20 off the regular price.

Click here to see all of my on-demand courses and webinar recordings. The latest addition to those offerings is the recording of last week’s sold-out live webinar, 5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom.

Book Me for Your Conference
I’ve given keynotes at conferences from Australia to Alaska for groups of all sizes from 50 to 2,000+. My keynotes focus on providing teachers and school administrators with practical ways to use technology to create better learning experiences for all students. I like to shine the light on others and so I often share examples of great work done by others as well as my own. Click here to book me today.