You Tube Downloaders Again
Following on from a training day in Birmingham yesterday, I promised the delegates I’d try and produce a summary post on some of the various ways to download videos from You Tube to use offline.
I have written about this before, and a list of all the posts on this blog that mention video can be found here.
The method I tend to use the most is this script which basically gives you a piece of code which you drag to your toolbar in Firefox as a button. When you click the button it puts a “download as mp4″ link on the YouTube page. Follow the instructions on the page. You will need to use the Firefox browser, which you can easily download for free here.
A different method is to use the ConvertTube website. You simply paste the URL (the web address) of the YouTube video you want to download, and it does the rest.
Similar sites are You Tube catcher, You Convert It and also Zamzar.com
There’s also a site called Kiss You Tube. If you find a YouTube video you want to download, simply edit the www.youtube.com/blah blah address and stick a “kiss” before the youtube bit. ie www.kissyoutube.com/blah blah. The instructions are on the Kiss You Tube site. Just add a kiss 
Sites such as You Tube use flash video (flv) format. This can be played directly on the page in Smart Notebook, as far as I know not yet in Promethean. You can download third party players that will play these files. If you have the choice of video format it is probably worth using a different format such as mp4 which can probably be played on something you already have on your computer without having to download anything else. You can then hyperlink to these files from your whiteboard software – they will then open up and play.
If you want to know how to insert a flv file into Smart Notebook, Jim Hollis has produced a great little guide here.
I’ve made a list of sites tagged with YouTube on Delicious. Some of the sites are downloaders, others are useful sites that may be of interest.
On the subject of sites for video resources – don’t forget to check out both Teachers TV and the BBC Learning Zone. Both of which have some very good teacher resources
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Podcast & Blogging Day Links
Just a quick blog post in advance of the Podcast/Blogging training day I’m delivering tomorrow in Kensington, London.
I just wanted to provide links to some of the resources that will be mentioned on the day
Teacherblogs – trainees blog posts
Podcasting with a Dictaphone – guide and presentation
Digital Native web links on Delicious
If we create any blogs on the day – I’ll add the links here so you can find them all after the training day.
http://boredoffacebook.wordpress.com
http://kangaroopaw.wordpress.com
http://coffeeteas.wordpress.com
http://kelmscottschool.wordpress.com
http://dibdobdeb.wordpress.com
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TeacherLED resources
Thanks to Jim over at Teachers Love Smartboards for reminding me about the Teacher LED site.
If you haven’t seen it before, there are some great Flash resources on there. Mainly for Numeracy, but also a great little scrollable world map for geography.
There’s also a nice Flash version of the Blockbusters game show. Very nice, and more interactive than my static version. You need to read out the questions yourself – but you could just use the glossary from any textbook or a list of subject keywords. The quiz can be adapted for any subject you want and would make a great lesson starter or plenary.
It’s a great little resource, and well worth a visit: http://www.teacherled.com/
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Making Video Screen Shots
I’ve written about this before, but it’s something that gets asked a lot when I am doing IWB training, so I thought it was worth flagging up again.
If you want to make screen grabs from some Windows Media videos, you may find you get a black box rather than the screen shot you were expecting. To make the computer render the video so that you can actually capture images from it, you need to make a quick change to the video player settings. Once done, you shouldn’t need to change it again (hopefully).
I’ve produced a short worksheet which I have uploaded to Scribd, hope it’s useful.
Changing Video Settings to Take Screen Shots
You could also watch the video demonstration of this here.
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Creative Commons Images and Sounds
In the last blog post I mentioned how to use FlickrCC to search for creative commons images to use in your presentations. There are some other search tools out there too.
I’ve just uploaded to Scribd a document I produced for the blogging/podcasting course about ways of finding creative commons images and sounds/music. I’ll embed it below.
Creative Commons Images and Sounds
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New IWB Presentation
I’ve been writing a new powerpoint presentation to use on my Interactive Whiteboard training days. I’ve previously used an IWB file but I wanted something that had less text and a better use of images. Having it in powerpoint format also means I can share it via SlideShare which is handy.
I used the Flickr Creative Commons search tool to find images to use. I’ve credited those images at the end of the presentation.
This new presentation gets its first airing at my training day in Glasgow on Monday. If you are interested in coming along to any of my sessions, I’ve now added a Google calendar to the sidebar of my blog so you can see when they are.
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Primary Science Lesson Starts
Just wanted to point you in the direction of a very nice video that’s available on the Teacher’s TV Website
It’s aimed at Primary Science teachers, and gives 7 different lesson starters to use on your Interactive Whiteboard.
All the starters are in one file, so I would suggest making a note of the time that each clip starts (or download the timings file from the downloads page) so when you use it with your class you can jump to the required clip using the video player slider.
You can view the video here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/28260
There are also some associated documents to go with the video in the Downloads page.
There is also a similar video for Primary Maths, which you can find here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/25557 as well as some Primary Literacy Story Starts here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/23316
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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