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11 Tools for Teaching With Videos – A PDF Handout

There are times when a good video or video clip can be just the thing that a student needs to see how all of the pieces of a topic come together. And sometimes just seeing a demonstration or hearing an explanation from a voice other than yours can be what your students need.

Today, YouTube is the default source of videos for many teachers. Of course, YouTube isn’t without it faults. One of those faults is distracting “related” content. Another fault being that YouTube doesn’t have a tool for adding questions to the videos that you share with your students. Fortunately, there are third-party services to address those problems.

Tools for Adding Questions to Videos – AKA Making Flipped Lessons

After a few years EDpuzzle remains at the top of my list of recommended tools for creating flipped video lessons. It is a neat tool that allows you to add your voice and text questions to educational videos. On EDpuzzle you can search for educational videos and or upload your own videos to use as the basis of your lesson. In your EDpuzzle lessons you can make it a requirement for students to answer a question before moving forward in the video. EDpuzzle has an online classroom component that you can use to assign videos to students and track their progress through your video lessons.

Vialogues is a free service that allows you to build online discussions around videos hosted online and videos that you have saved on your computer. Registered users can upload videos to Vialogues or use YouTube videos as the centerpieces of their conversations. After you have selected a video from YouTube or uploaded a video of your own, you can post poll questions and add comments that are tied to points in the video. Your Vialogue can be made public or private. Public Vialogues can be embedded into your blog or website.

Find more tools like EDpuzzle and Vialogues in this Google Document that I created.

Remove Distractions from YouTube

When you’re showing a video in your classroom you can remove distracting sidebar and “related” materials from YouTube with the following tools.

ViewPure is one of my longest standing recommendations for viewing YouTube videos without distractions. At its basic level to use View Pure just copy the link of a video into the “purifier” on the View Pure website and then click purify. Your “purified” video will be displayed on a blank white background. You can password-protect links to videos that you share through ViewPure (click here for directions). In the last year ViewPure expanded to offer curated collections of educational videos.

Watchkin is a service that provides a few ways to watch YouTube videos without seeing the related video suggestions and comments. You can enter the direct URL of a video into Watchkin to have the sidebar content removed. You can search for videos through Watchkin and have family-friendly results displayed (if a video appears that is not family-friendly Watchkin has a mechanism for flagging it as inappropriate). Watchkin also offers a browser bookmarklet tool that you can click while on YouTube.com to have the related content disappear from the page.

Find more tools like these in my Google Doc, 11 Tools for Teaching With YouTube Videos. You can also get the document as a PDF through the Box.com widget below.

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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. Send an email to richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com book me today.