Tuesday Tech Tidbit

While geeking out on Twitter, I stumbled upon an amazing Apple Distinguished Educator who publishes slick videos on YouTube that quickly and easily demonstrate how to more effectively use the iPad in the classroom.   Jacob Woolcock is a computing and digital learning teacher in the U.K.  His iPad QuickTips YouTube channel provides viewers with easy-to-follow videos (often less than 2 minutes) that demonstrate an educational concept on the iPad.  His videos include tutorials on: iMovie Freeform Keynote Clips I appreciate how easy it is to follow these videos and then directly apply them to classroom usage.  If you are interested in brushing up your iPad skills or designing creative projects for your students, you should visit: https://www.youtube.com/@iPadQuickTips Have a wonderful summer! 🌞

We've all wanted to play a specific section of a YouTube video to our class.  Time is wasted while you navigate to the section.  Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically jump to a predetermined starting or ending point when playing a YouTube video?  Spoiler alert.  You can. I will demonstrate here how generated custom starting and ending points when inserting a YouTube video into a Google slide.  This technique is useful when playing slides to your classes, but it will also help with  resource sharing in Google Classroom.  The video below demonstrates how to start and end videos at fixed points in Google slides.  

YouTube has a lot of tricks up its sleeve to make your classroom viewing experience more enjoyable.  All teachers hate when they play a YouTube video in front of their class just to be confronted with an embarrassing barrage of advertisements and video recommendations.  You don't have to put up with this!  Read on to learn about some tricks to make your YouTube viewing and sharing experience more efficient. Play video in full screen with no ads or suggested videos The image below shows two ways you can make a slight alteration to the video's URL to make it play in full screen with no ads or suggested videos.  An easy thing to remember is to ad a hyphen in the word YouTube in the URL between the 'T' and the 'U' (yout-ube.com).  Try it!  You'll be impressed.  Click on this link to see it in action:   https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=w8OnpsoDxns Download a YouTube video to your computer If the Internet is being less than cooperative, you can get...

Screen Recording using Control Center We've all been there. You plan to show a snippet of a video on YouTube. Your attentive students are watching. The following series of unfortunate events ensue: A bunch of advertisements start playing. You struggle to get the playhead to the right part of the video. The video buffers. Your students lose interest and start watching TikTok videos on their phones. Never fear. You have the power to avert this scenario by using your iPad to record a screen capture of the streaming video. By saving the video to your iPad, you can ensure that none of the above problems occur. You can then upload the saved video to Google Classroom. You can even add your own narration to the video while you capture it.  Watch the video below to see how. Videos that are saved in your Photos app can easily be uploaded to Google Classroom.  When creating a post in Google Classroom, select the Attachments icon and choose Pick Photo .  Easy peasy! For more informa...

Keynote is an incredibly capable program that can create multimedia presentations that run circles around Google Slides.  I highly recommend taking advantage of Keynote when assigning students projects that include multimedia presentations. When working with another teacher, I discovered that Keynote does not appear to allow streaming videos to be embedded directly into a presentation.  Keynote prefers to access videos directly from the iPad.  No worries mate!  It's fairly easy to download a streaming video and then embed it into a Keynote.  I recommend using the website btclod.com to download streaming videos (such as YouTube videos).  The video below demonstrates how to accomplish this. UPDATE!  The btclod website is blocked at Hudson.  You can instead try  https://www.youtubedownloader-online.com .   Let me know if you have any questions or need follow-up support.  🙂