7 Ideas for Collaborative Video Projects – And a New Video Editor
Questions about making videos are the ones that Rushton Hurley and I get asked more than any other during our free Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions webinars. We often end up recommending WeVideo and Adobe Spark. Last week a new video editing tool was released by Canva and it rivals my old standby of Adobe Spark for quick, convenient, collaborative, video creation.
Canva’s new video editor goes beyond the basics of the previous video creation options that it offered. The new editor includes:
- Online collaboration. Students can invite their classmates to work on a video project remotely.
- Hundreds of video project templates designed for classroom projects.
- Millions of stock pictures, drawings, and icons.
- Large library of free music and video clips to include in video projects.
- A built-in video recorder.
- Import and edit existing video clips.
- Videos can be downloaded as MP4 files and or published online via Canva.
How it Works
Watch this video that I made to learn how to create a video from start to finish with Canva’s video editor.
The basic framework of Canva’s video editor is that you build your video on a frame-by-frame basis much like a slideshow presentation. However, each frame can be as short or as long as you want it to be and each frame can be as simple or complex as you make it. All frames automatically expand in length to fit the needs of animation timing as well as the timing of imported video clips.
Within each frame of your Canva video you can add pictures, text, video clips, and background audio. You can also add background audio to the entire video and edit that audio separately from the video frames.
Projects Students Can Complete With Canva’s New Video Editor
- Book trailer videos (“sell” classmates on reading a book).
- Mini-documentary videos.
- Travel and tourism videos.
- Utilize the gallery of free video clips and pictures to make videos about interesting places around the world.
- Demonstrations of science lab activities.
- Animations of short fiction stories.
- Instructional videos about passion topics like photography, music, or sports.
- Common Craft-style explanatory videos.