Think Outside the Book
There are many sites that can help you and your students produce content. Below are a few to help you plan. Choose the best ones for your class by testing all of them first on your students.
Then ask yourself the 3 Ws of Creating Content: What site is best for what activity in my class? Look at the next 6 weeks and think what projects and assignments you have for your students. Then think of the content you must teach. Looking back at your previous experience, think what the students have most difficulty understanding or connecting to. Select that piece as your chosen activity, and pick one of the sites below. The assignment/project/homework can be to ask your students to represent visually the concept. Once submitted, you can choose the best and play it for your class, while explaining how it reflects the task (it is clear, it offers a real-life application, it addresses current issues, it is original, the quality is good, it is comprehensive, it explains the concept). Visual examples are very powerful, and they inspire and engage. Who in my class is ready to create content right now? Who needs a little coaching (and a good rubric), and who do I guide through the process very closely? If they can work well without your guidance, then you can let them select their tool of choice from a list. If they are less independent, give them a simple tool that doesn't require a steep learning curve (you want them to focus on the content making, not on learning the tool). When do we use each? Take a look at your class period setup; if you have a grouping time, that's the best for collaborative content creation at school. If your class is split into stations you can assign each session a part of the content creation process, some can create the animations, some the overall presentation, some may type the needed content, and some may design how each piece fits, and coordinate (and assist!) the production. If you use a warm-up or exit ticket, those may be your content creation opportunities. Remember that the students have access to these tools outside the class, and if they have a say in selecting them, they will be more than happy to work on this "homework". If you are a PBL teacher then definitely flip the assignment. A good presentation is essential in PBL, and if they create the pieces as they go, it is far easier for you to guide them, and for them to be ready and meet the deadlines. Our students create content. You need customized content. Your subject matter will benefit from a library of student made content. Your students need an eportfolio. So many options, in such a little time! Yes, you can!
Interactive Videos Makers
Zaption is a web app for teachers, trainers, and content publishers to use video as an interactive experience Zaption works with most learning management systems, including Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, and Schoology. The Zaption Gallery contains a variety of FREE, high-quality interactive “learning tours” that you can instantly copy and customize for your students. Gallery tours are produced by Zaption’s hand-picked content partners and help students deepen understanding on standard-based concepts. All videos accessible in Zaption are legally streamed from online hosting providers who own and/or manage the copyright to the original media and give us permission to use it on our platform. For example, when PBS places a video on YouTube, PBS maintains the original copyright but gives YouTube permission to distribute the video on their website and to websites like Zaption that pull in videos via the YouTube API. As long as YouTube is satisfied that PBS is the true copyright owner, then they will keep it online, and we can legally use it in Zaption. EDpuzzle is a new innovative site that lets you take just about any video off the web, edit it down to the portions you want, add audio notes and questions for students, and create virtual classrooms where you can monitor individual student work. Search for videos from Youtube, Khan Academy, LearnZillion, Crash Course, etc. You can also upload your own videos to EDpuzzle and make them perfect for your class. Add questions along the video to give your students immediate feedback and track their understanding. Insert audio notes or record over a video with your voice. Educreations is an exciting app that transforms your iPad into a recordable whiteboard. It records your voice, handwriting and also allows you to insert pictures to produce your own personal video lessons that you and your students can share online. Annotate, animate, and narrate nearly any type of content as you explain any concept. Teachers can create short instructional videos and share them instantly with students, or ask students to show what they know and help friends learn something new. An iPad is not required in order to view lessons. Finished lessons automatically sync to your online Educreations account so you can share them instantly with anyone, even if they don't have an iPad. You control who can see what. If you want to create lessons, you will need an iPad with the Educreations app installed. EduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows teachers to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Teachers can track the progress of their students within eduCanon. To create lessons start by identifying a topic and objective then searching YouTube and Vimeo from within the eduCanon site. Once you've found a suitable video you can build multiple choice questions throughout the timeline of your chosen video. You can create as many lessons as you like and assign them to your students at any time. ThingLink is a free and user friendly digital tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image into an interactive graphic. Create multiple “hot spots” on specific parts of an image and turn that image into a multimedia launcher. Include video, record audio or provide a link to any website with the click of a button. Easily embed an interactive ThingLink graphic into any blog or website. ThingLink is a truly amazing tool that allows users to pack a lot of content into a small space.
Video Editors
Youtube Editor With the Video Editor, you can: - Combine multiple videos and images you've uploaded to create a new video - Trim your clips to custom lengths - Add music to your video from a library of approved tracks - Customize clips with special tools and effects You can get to the Editor at http://www.youtube.com/editor. Using these tools, you can put together clips to create new videos and publish them to YouTube.
Vimeo Editor Vimeo is a smaller video sharing website that focuses on artists, musicians and filmmakers. It's ranked top 100 most visited website in US from Alexa's data, far behind YouTube. However, Vimeo has lots of creative films compared to YouTube's entertaining clips. They offer a library of lessons that they call Vimeo Video School that can help you and your students perfect your video editing skills (or you can flip on them with this material and let them do it).
Animations
GoAnimate is a fun and creative way to turn a script or a story into an animated video! It’s a free website that requires no artistic talent. With GoAnimate, anyone from students to business associates can find a use for creating an animated video. GoAnimate offers a selection of templates, backgrounds, music, sounds, characters, and even languages or accents for your characters. You have the opportunity to type twenty lines of dialogue to create your story, or you can record your own voice for your characters! The step-by-step process is easy and there is a guided process that eliminates any confusion. When you are finished, GoAnimate creates a video for you which you can share and publish to any number of social media sites for everyone to see! Toondoo is safe (per CoomonSenseMedia's rating) environmnet for your studnets to explore their funny side and have fun with content. It’s a free, fast, and easy comic strip creator. Aside from the basic characters in Toondoo, you are able to create your own. By uploading a facial picture of an individual, you can modify the facial features of a character in order to make the cartoon resemble the person as closely as possible. Once you are done, you can save this character to be used in future developments. Toondoo is a web-based application. Any computer with Internet connectivity and able to handle Flash is able to utilize this app. Powtoon is an online presentation tool that enables you and your students to create professional-quality videos in just minutes. So how can Powtoon work in your students’ hands? The most straightforward use would be for end-of-unit projects, where students demonstrate their learning with a presentation or by creating their own student-run lesson. Instead of a constructed response question, book report or feature article, students would write the script for and then produce a video that demonstrates the same kind of learning. It can also be used to differentiate: If a group of students have already learned the basic material, but you need more time to review with others, assigning a Powtoon project to the advanced students for more in-depth research can keep everyone engaged. In a skills-based class like math, having students produce a Powtoon to teach a challenging math concept will reinforce it further. And by pairing or grouping students, you give them practice in collaboration AND strengthen their understanding of content through discussions of how to present it. It goes without saying that you can also use Powtoon to create your own presentations, replacing PowerPoints in a lecture, or providing an alternative to verbal instructions for a task. Voki is an educational tool that allows users to create their very own talking character. Through this program, as an instructor, you can create an avatar to represent yourself or someone else to represent the topic you are trying to teach. You can then add speech to this avatar to make the experience easier on your students. Voki characters can be customized to look like historical figures, cartoons, animals, and even yourself! Give your Voki a voice by recording with a microphone, using our dial-in number, or uploading an audio file. Voki characters can be emailed, shared on social media, and embedded on websites.Voki Classroom is a student assignment management system for Voki. With Voki Classroom, teachers are able to control their students’ privacy settings. Visit the Products page to see the benefits of upgrading to Voki Classroom. Voki’s database of lesson plans is searchable by grade level and subject area. Objectives, Materials, and Activities for each lesson are clearly laid out, and the lesson plans can all be rated.
Screen Recording
Screencast-O-Matic is a handy tool for recording screenshots and sharing them. With just a few clicks, you can start recording your screen, and once you're satisfied with your video, you can upload it directly from there, or download the video to add to your library. Straightforward mechanics: To start a recording, all you have to do is open the program, position the recording window, and press Play or the activating hot key. And when your recording is complete, just hit Done on the small control bar located below the bottom margin of the recording window. You can also Pause in the middle of a recording and then resume using these controls. Direct publishing options: When you finish a recording, you'll automatically be taken to a preview screen where you can watch your recording and see what you think. If you're satisfied, there are several saving and publishing options listed along the right-hand side of the screen. For instance, you can upload your video directly to YouTube or to the Screencast-O-Matic website, or you can save it as a video file to your computer in either MP4, AVI, FLV, or GIF format.
Podcasting
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. The interface is translated into many languages. You can use Audacity to: - Record live audio. - Record computer playback on any Windows Vista or later machine. - Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs. - Edit WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP2, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis sound files. AC3, M4A/M4R (AAC), WMA and other formats supported using optional libraries. - Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together. Numerous effects including change the speed or pitch of a recording. And more! See the complete list of features.
Notebooks
OneNote Class Notebook Creator saves teachers time and boosts classroom efficiency by: - Making it easier to collect homework, quizzes, exams and handouts. - Enabling all student work and teacher feedback to be exchanged automatically in one place virtually anytime, anywhere. - Combining real-time, individualized coaching of a shared notebook with the collaborative creativity of OneNote and digital handwriting. The app creates a OneNote class notebook, which is organized into three areas: Student notebooks: Private notebooks that are shared between the teacher and each individual student. Teachers can access these notebooks at any time, but students cannot see each other’s notebooks. Content library: A place where teachers can handout course materials to students. Collaboration space: A space for anyone in the class to share, organize and collaborate. Evernote is a free app for your smartphone and computer that stores everything you could possibly imagine losing track of, like a boarding pass, receipt, article you want to read, to do list, or even a simple typed note. LiveBinders for Education not only replaces the old 3-ring binder, but also opens up new opportunities for collaborating, organizing, and sharing. A few features: Update in real-time Collaborate with multiple teachers or district staff Deliver instantly Keep binders private or make them public Remove the "lost assignment" excuse Carry 50 in just one hand!
Presentations
Google Slides is an online, collaborative presentations application that lets you create, edit, and deliver presentations and collaborate with other people in real time. Learn more about Google Slides features. Prezi is a presentation tool that can be used as an alternative to traditional slide making programs such as PowerPoint. Instead of slides, Prezi makes use of one large canvas that allows you to pan and zoom to various parts of the canvas and emphasize the ideas presented there. Prezi supports the use of text, images, and videos and also provides a collection of templates to choose from to help new users get accustomed to the interface. Emaze is a free online presentation tool for designing and building presentation slide decks. The tool is positioned as being a cross between PowerPoint and Prezi, built on HTML5. emaze is currently in Beta testing mode and is thus free to trial. It allows you to build presentations online using an HTML5-based system. emaze does not require any software to be downloaded and can be used anywhere with an internet connection and an up-to-date browser. The comparisons with Prezi come from the in-built 3D effects and zooming transitions available in certain emaze templates. Users don’t need to be designers or understand the workings of the software to take advantage of these features; they can just select the relevant template. Slide decks can easily be shared online with others, and you can even allow collaboration between team members. Tackk in the Classroom is a free website maker currently in beta, and will help you create any single-page website (or Tackks) in minutes. Your Tackk page is not all about text. You can easily add lists, buttons, photos from your hard drive or Instagram, videos from YouTube, Vimeo or Hulu, embedded songs from Spotify or SoundCloud, maps, a contact form (registered users only), comments, and even a payment widget that lets you sell products and accept PayPal payments. Adding an element could not be easier: hover over an existing element and click on the plus sign. Provide the necessary details, and you're good to go. Contact forms, maps, and payment elements are added from the Features tab in the Editor. Smore is a service for quickly creating great-looking webpages like this one!. Smore markets itself as a service for creating online flyers, but it's a little bit more than that. To me "flyer" implies that you're creating a single-use PDF and posting it online. Smore's flyers are dynamic and changeable, they're not single-use PDFs. Your Smore flyers can include many types of media including videos. Deleting or adding elements to your Smore flyer is as simple as dragging and dropping them on or off your page.