Three Good Ways to Turn Your Writing Into Videos

In a recent episode of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions Rushton and I tackled a question about creating videos. Specifically, how to create videos that are generated from text.

I had a few suggestions of tools to use to generate videos from text. Those are featured below. First, let’s talk about why you might use one of these tools.

Why Create Videos from Text

The person who sent me the original question wanted to avoid having her face and voice in a video. That’s actually a fairly common concern and is one reason you might choose to use a text-to-video tool.

Perhaps you don’t have a good environment in which to record video or audio. For example, a classroom with concrete walls and floors often creates an echo on recordings unless you have a quality microphone to filter it out.

Some schools have a blanket policy that doesn’t allow students to appear in A/V projects. In that case, a text-to-video tool provides a way for those students to make videos.

Finally, some of these text-to-video tools just flat-out save you time when you need to quickly produce a video.

Simpleshow

Simpleshow is a free tool for creating Common Craft-style explanatory videos.

The first step in using Simpleshow is to write a script for your video. The script is written in chapters in a template that becomes the outline for your video. After you have written your script Simpleshow will take it and give you suggested images and animations to use. The suggestions are based on the keywords in your script. Adding narration to your video is the last step in the Simpleshow editor. There is an automated text-to-speech narration that will read your script as narration for your video. Completed videos can be downloaded and or directly uploaded to YouTube from Simpleshow.

Narakeet

Narakeet is a tool that will convert your slides (with speaker notes) into a video that is automatically narrated for you. You can choose from about twenty voiceover options, adjust the speed of the voiceover, and choose to have captions automatically added into your video. In this short video I demonstrate how to use Canva and Narakeet to create an automatically narrated video lesson.

Lumen5

Lumen5 is a tool that will produce a video for you based upon your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or submit the text of an article you’ve written. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. The video will always begin with the title of your article. From there it will use any subheadings or section headings that you have in your article to create sections of your video. If you don’t have subheadings or section headings in your article, Lumen5 will attempt to pull the keywords or phrases from each paragraph. Here’s a video demonstration of how to use Lumen5.

5 Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom

On March 14th I’m starting a new online course all about making and teaching with video. Learn more and register here!