Explania – instructional animations
Explania is a website which contains loads of animated explanations, interactive tutorials and instructional videos.
The site covers a wide range of topics from “What is Twitter?” to “The Human Heart” as well as software guides for MS Office and more. For example How to apply conditinal formatting in Excel 2007
It even tries to explain the offside rule in football:
What is offside in football? – Explania
It’s rather a strange mix of videos, some will be useful for teachers, whilst others might want to be avoided. But it is worth a look and you might find a few gems in there that you will find useful. Videos are pulled in from YouTube so if you school blocks YouTube you won’t be able to access the videos.
Thanks to Richard Byrne at Free Tech for Teachers for the link
Take a look at Explania and let me know what you think in the comments.
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YouTube for Schools Launches
Following on from Septembers launch of YouTube for Teachers, comes the launch today of YouTube for Schools.
YouTube for Schools “lets schools access free educational YouTube videos while limiting access to other YouTube content. Students can learn from more than 400,000 educational videos, from well-known organizations like Stanford, PBS and TED, and from up-and-coming YouTube partners with millions of views. Schools can also customize their YouTube for Schools experience, adding videos that are only viewable within their school network.”
School admins and teachers can log in and watch any video, but students cannot log in and can only watch YouTube EDU videos and videos that their school has added. All comments and related videos are disabled and search is limited to YouTube Edu videos.
It’s an interesting idea, and only time will tell if this will convince many schools and local authorities to unblock access to YouTube and allow access in this way.
Schools can find out more and sign up at http://www.youtube.com/schools
Read MoreYouTube Launches New Site for Teachers
Teachers who love YouTube will be interested to know that today YouTube have launched a channel specifically aimed at teachers : http://www.youtube.com/teachers.
It contains guides on how to use YouTube in the classroom, as well as curated video playlists that will be suitable for teachers to use. For teachers who have yet to really use YouTube it’s a great place to start. Experienced users may still learn something new.
You can also sign up to the YouTube Teachers Community and receive regular updates from the YouTube team, including tips and tricks for incorporating YouTube in your classroom, best practices from other teachers, and great new content uploaded on YouTube.
According to Mind Shift, the new teachers site is part one of two big YouTube projects for teachers. In the next couple of weeks, a bigger announcement will be made about huge changes that will address many of the concerns teachers have had about using YouTube videos in the classroom.
This still won’t help you if your local authority/school block access to YouTube for everyone. Try and get them to at least open it up for teacher logins – there are so many useful resources out there it’s a shame to block access.
Don’t forget that there is also YouTube Edu which has lots of educational videos on it as well.
Read MoreAccess YouTube Videos Without the Clutter
One of the problems with using YouTube videos with a class (once you’ve got past the problem of getting your school to agree to give access to YouTube) is that invariably the clip will be accompanied by comments below it, many of which might be unsavory. There’s also links to other videos and banner advertisment, all of which may be distracting to the students.
There are several ways that you can access YouTube videos without all those distractions. Here are just a few:
QuieTube
QuieTube gives you a button which you can drag to your toolbar. When you see a YouTube video you want to use, click the button and you’ll get a URL which will let you watch just the video. Embed this link into your IWB page to go straight to the video page.
View Pure
Go to the View Pure website, enter the URL of a YouTube video and it strips out everything but the video. Very simple to use. You can even drag a button to your desktop which does the job. You can also then take the URL of the page you get, and hyperlink to that page.
Accessible YouTube
This is an interface to YouTube designed for people who access their computers via either 2 switches or a mouse. It allows the user to use two keys/switches or a mouse to navigate through a list of videos, and watch any or all of them. Currently the list of videos can be a playlist, the results of a video search, the related videos for a particular video, or YouTube’s most popular videos. For now, you must use Firefox in order for it to work.
Thanks to Shannon Smith (@brachsmith) for the Accessible YouTube link via Twitter.
This is a modified version of YouTube designed to use on large-screen televisions, and so also on Interactive Whiteboards. The interface makes it simpler to use by cutting out a lot of the clutter on the page. Theres no way of hyperlinking to a specific video, but you can add any you like to your Favourites, which you can then access under the Favourites tab on the main YouTube XL screen.
Remember – None of these tools moderate the video content though, so you still have to use YouTube resources wisely.
You will also still need a YouTube connection at school though, these are not ways around filtered content. If you can’t access YouTube in school, these will not work.
If you have any other tools like this, add them to the comments.
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YouTube Create: Easy Digital Storytelling
Now it is even easier to create content for YouTube without even needing a video camera or webcam. YouTube has just launched ‘YouTube Create‘ a new portal pulling together three great animation tools: GoAnimate, Stupeflix, an Xtranormal, each of which lets you ‘build’ custom videos featuring virtual avatars, custom speech, and more. All three would be excellent resources to support digital storytelling.
From the YouTube Create portal, choose a tool, and you’ll jump into their editing interface where you can put together a video for free. Each of them also offers paid-for options (more sound options, animations, etc.) which you can pay to access.
It’s a much more seamless way to access these tools, and to get the finished product up onto YouTube. You’ll need to sign up with a YouTube account before you can access the tools. For more about Xtranormal, read my blog post from last year.
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Channel 4 / YouTube Dream Teachers Competition
Jamie Oliver/Channel 4 have teamed up with YouTube to find Britain’s most engaging real-life dream teachers.Often, the best teaching goes unnoticed and unrewarded. To bring that teaching out into the world, Channel 4 is asking you to share your skills with the world via YouTube. If you have a great approach to teaching a tough topic, make a video and post it up. The video doesn’t have to be professional quality, it’s inspiring ideas that matter.
The subjects that can take part are Maths, English, History, Geography, Biology, Chemistry and Physics
Channel 4 is offering a prize of £3,000 for the best teacher for each subject, as well as £7,000 for their school. The 7 winners will also receive special recognition from YouTube and Jamie Oliver and an invitation to an award ceremony at Google in London this spring. You have to be currently employed as a secondary school teacher or a teacher in training in order to enter. Closing date is Tuesday April 5th.
More information can be found here. (warning, contains scenes of Jamie Oliver which some people may find disturbing)
Even if you don’t want to take part, visit the DreamTeachers YouTube channel to see some inspiring videos produced as entries into the competition.
Good Luck!
Read MoreHamstersoft video converter
If you have any video files on your computer that you wish to change into other file formats to use in particular software then you should really check out Hamster Free Video Converter. For example you can convert videos into FLV format so that they play on a page in Smart Notebook. Or convert downloaded youtube videos into other formats to play on a mobile device.
Hamster Free Video Converter is very easy-to-use and requires no special knowledge to convert video files.
You just select the video files to be converted, make the settings and click Convert! It’s very simple!
You can download it for free from here.
Guides on how to use it can be found here via the Hamstersoft website.
Read MoreFreecorder – another YouTube downloader
Here’s yet another way to get hold of YouTube videos as flv files to embed into Smart Notebook and ActivInspire Pages, it’s called Freecorder and you can download it here.
Videos from YouTube and like sites are transmitted and captured in FLV format. Many of these video sites cache the video on your PC if you’ve already played it. Freecorder 4 is smart enough to search your cache, locate videos you’ve recently played, and even show the name of the video so you can archive it easily on your PC. It’s the best way to save these FLV video clips.
Freecorder 4 makes it easy to save video and audio from the web, and convert to many popular formats. Once Freecorder 4 is installed, just use the toolbar in your browser. Freecorder should work in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Here’s a guide on how to do it.
And yes, the usual disclaimers apply. By using this you will be in breach of the YouTube terms and conditions – so use accordingly.
Read MoreView Pure – a YouTube Cleaner
View Pure is another way to watch Youtube without all the on-screen clutter and dodgy comments. Basically you go to View Pure, enter the URL of a YouTube video and it strips out everything but the video. Very simple to use. You can even drag a button to your desktop which does the job. : http://viewpure.com/
You can also then take the URL of the page you get, and hyperlink to that page. Like this http://viewpure.com/LTCtfT8KFc4 (video is safe for work..and if you haven’t watched it, it’s quite funny!)
It doesn’t moderate the content though, so you still have to use YouTube resources wisely. You will still need a YouTube connection at school though, this is not a way around filtered content. If you can’t access YouTube in school, this will not work.
As an alternative – check out YouTube’s own YouTube XL.
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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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