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! 🌞

Many teachers share slideshows with their students that demonstrate learning concepts.  These are particularly helpful when students want to access information from a past lecture or a tutorial.  Apple's amazing slideshow production app, Keynote, offers a simple way for you to add live video to a presentation. With Keynote's Live Video feature, teachers can insert themselves into a presentation so students can see and hear what they have to say about a presentation.  Instead of just reading text on a screen, students get to see and hear their teacher.  You can also use the rear camera on your iPad to record live footage of a concept you wish to demonstrate in your presentation.  This is a great way to bring students up to speed if they missed an important lab.   When used in conjunction with screen recording on your iPad, you can create movie presentations for your students or professional learning communities.  Quickly make tutorials that contai...

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...

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a one-stop shop for converting files and editing PDFs?  Meet your new best friend, 123apps !  This website offers a bunch of free, web-based applications that allow you to edit a variety of media files as well as convert files from one format to another.  The interface is super easy, yet this resource is quite powerful. The biggest draw to 123apps in my opinion is its massive array of PDF editing functions .  You can split, merge, compress, and rotate PDFs.  If you have a couple of PDFs that you want to merge together, or if you want to snag a couple of pages from a giant PDF document, look no further than 123apps.  While you're at it, you can convert a wide variety of file types into PDF, or you can convert a PDF into an image file. 123apps also offers a wide range of video and audio editing tools. You can: Trim video Merge videos Add audio to video Rotate video Flip video Change video speed 123apps has a voice recorder as ...

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...

As students produce videos for class projects, one impressive feature they might explore is the ability for their iPads to create green screen (chroma key) effects.  Using green screen, students can insert themselves into a completely different scene.  For example, students can deliver a news report from Paris, or they can walk on the moon.   Using the green screen feature in iMovie is super easy.  Students are invited to come to the media center to record their videos.   The media center has a green screen available in the Digital Den.  After the video is recorded, students will use the green screen feature in iMovie to superimpose their video onto a completely different background image or video.  Apple offers an iMovie tutorial that demonstrates how to edit green screen video on the iPad.  The video below also takes you through the steps. I encourage you to advertise green screen video recording to your students.  I welcome stud...

Screencastify is a powerful screen capture extension for Chrome that allows you to record videos of your screen.  It is perfect for creating tutorials or demonstrations for your students.  Our district has an Unlimited plan, which opens powerful editing capabilities.  There's a lot you can do with your videos after you finish recording them, such as placing text, zooming, cropping, or burring out areas of the movies.  But I digress. Screencastify recently added the ability to create Interactive Questions to your videos.  Similar to Edpuzzle , the Interactive Questions in Screencastify allow you to place quiz questions at various points in your video.  When students watch your video, they will be prompted to answer questions before continuing.  This ensures that students are comprehending (ie, paying attention) the content.  When answering interactive questions, students will be prompted to sign in with Google.  You will get a record of your s...

Using the Keynote iPad app, students can create amazing multimedia presentations that put Google Slides to shame. But once these presentations are completed, teachers want to be able to easily open them on their Windows computer and assess them in Google Classroom.  Impossible, you say?  Not at all! The secret to submitting full-featured, multimedia presentations into Google Classroom is for students to submit an iCloud link rather than a physical file.  The video below demonstrates how a student uses an iPad to submit a Keynote presentation (with a video!) to his teacher in Google Classroom.  The teacher then opens the presentation on a Windows PC and plays the full-featured presentation in the Chrome browser, all without leaving Google Classroom.  If you thought this was impossible ... watch on! By demonstrating how easily Keynote can play nicely with Google Classroom and Windows computers, I hope more teachers and students take the plunge and discover the am...

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.  🙂