Create Engaging Video Tasks with Kapwing

Kapwing is a great free online video editor that makes a number of video editing activities simple.

Using the tool you can:

• Add subtitles to videos
• Trim the length to focus on specific sections.
• Resize and loop
• Add meme text to video
• Add sound effects
• Create stop motion video

All you need is either your own video file or the link to a clip online.

• Go to the site, choose what you want to do and then use Kapwing’s easy interface to carry out your edit.
• Once you have finished just click on create. 

The tool is free to use and just adds a small logo. If you want to get rid of the logo, then you can pay a minimal amount to download a version with your own brand or logo on. There are no subscriptions necessary so you just pay for the videos that you want when you want them.

Here are some great activities you can do with these tools.

Adding subtitles

• You can students use the tool to transcribe or translate a video.
• You can get them to add narrative to a silent video or cartoon.
• You can ask them to add what the people are thinking or feeling instead of the script.

Trimming video

• You can focus students on just a short part of a clip.
• You can edit one clip into 3 - 4 sections and then get students to watch and put the sections in the correct chronological order.
• You can create a video gap-fil and take a section out of a video clip and see if students can guess what happened in the missing part.

Add meme text

• You can use short action clips and get students to think of memes to go on them. These could be quotes, advice, idioms or just something funny.

Having a free browser based tool Kapwing can help you to create interesting and engaging materials for students, but it can also allow students to get some hands on experience of editing video and so help to build their digital literacies.

I hope you and your students enjoy using Kapwing. You can find lots more ideas, lesson plans tools, video tutorials and teaching suggestions in my award winning ebook - Digital Video - A Manual For Language Teachers.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

A Tool to Encourage Students to Self-Correct & Improve their Writing

SAS Writing Reviser is a really cleverly designed Chrome Add-on to get your students self-assessing and improving their own writing. Once installed, you can open a document in Google Docs and then decide what aspects of your writing you would like to improve.

The add-on opens in the sidebar of the document, and you can select from a number of aspects that you would like to work on.

 Select from the menu, and you will see a sub menu that has more specific features to choose from.

 When you click on one of the features, you will see the places in your document where improvements could be made and get a list of them in the sidebar.

 You can then decide which sentences are okay and which you would like to improve.
You can also get some advice and explanation of the feature to find out how it impacts on your writing.

 This is a marvellous tool which I intend to start using myself. It doesn't do the work for the students like a grammar or spell-checker, but it does push them to think about their writing at a more stylistic level.
 It's probably more suited to higher level learners and particularly good for anyone working on EAP or studying for an IELTS or similar exam.

SAS Writing Reviser is a great tool for anyone using Google Docs. I hope it helps you and your students to improve your writing.
 

Get lesson plans, teaching tips and teacher resource books with our Teachers' Classroom App.

 

 

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

 

 

Easy Photo Editing

If you or your students need to edit photographs or pictures quickly, easily and for free, then DrPic.com could be the place for you. You can crop, resize add text change colours and create a number off effects with the real minimum of ease. You simply upload a picture from your computer and start to play.

You can also download the images to your hard drive or upload them to the web and all without any registration or passwords.

DrPic is a great tool for creating your own flash cards, adding text to images or just giving your students some hands on practice at doing their own photo editing. I'll certainly be using this myself.

Related links:

• Downloading Online video
• Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life
• Exploiting Image Sequences
• Free video editing software
• Edit Online videos
• Online photo editing

Best

Nik Peachey

Free PDF editor

I haven't tried this yet, but I have just seen a free PDF editor on SourceForge.net

Here's what it says; "Free editor for PDF documents. Complete editing of PDF documents is possible with PDFedit. You can change raw pdf objects (for advanced users) or use many gui functions."

Sounds pretty handy. I would also recommend keeping an eye on and having a look around SourceForge.net as there is quite a lot of useful free software there.

Hope you find it useful

Best
Nik

DVD converter

Handbrake is a really useful piece of free software I've been using recently. It enables you to convert and even edit DVDs so that you can play them on other devices. This includes a range of mobile devices like i-pod and Sony PSP as well as just playing them on your computer / TV.

It also gives you the option of copying them with the subtitles showing or just saving particular scenes and reduces the file sizes for storing back ups of your DVDs.

It's really useful and runs on a range of platforms MAC and Linux as well as Windows.

Hope you find it useful, but remember to respect copyright laws.

Best

Nik

Downloading Online video

iDesktop.tv provides a really useful and user friendly service for anyone who wants to use video clips from sources like YouTube, but doesn't want their students looking around at anything unsuitable, or for anyone who has ever found a really useful clip, only to go back later and find it has moved or been removed.

You can use the site to search through a huge collection of videos from various video sharing sites and when you find something you like the site will download and convert it to a file type of your choosing.

The range of file types is great and includes ones suitable for mobile phones and i-pods, so if you want to get your students doing some mobile learning then this is a seriously useful site.

The site is free and you can use it without login or registration, though if you do register, it's free and you do get other services too.

Hope you find this useful and by all means leave a comment here if you've tried it.

Best

Nik

Free video editing software

I just spotted this rather nice simple video editing suite from Pinnacle. It's free to download (150Mb) and has quite a few nice features that put it above the standard Microsoft video editor.

It supports flash and direct upload to YouTube, it also enables you to save your movies in a number of formats, many of which are compatible with a range of mobile devices such as i-pod and Sony PSP.

I've downlaoded it and it seems pretty easy to use. You can add transitions, text , music sound effects etc.

The catch is that if you want to keep using the codecs that enable you to export to DivX and Mepg2 - 4, then after a 15 day trial you'll need to buy those. Not sure yet how much they are though.

You can download it from: http://videospin.com/

If you don't need those, then this is a really handy video editor for free.
It runs on Vista and XP, but not MAC, but then if you have a MAC you won't need it.

Hope you find this useful

Best

Nik

Edit Online videos

Scenemaker.net looks like a really handy tool. It allows you to create your own channel and capture just the parts of various YouTube and other online videos. That way you can just show your students the parts you want them to watch. It also gives you an 'embed code' so that you can embed the video clip into your own blog or digital materials.

This is a nice way to grab and edit online video without having to download it onto your own computer and break the law.

Also helps to stop your students from wandering off onto other unsuitable stuff.

Hope you find it useful

Best

Nik

Online photo editing

This isn't particularly educational but it is really impressive. It's an online photo editing and sharing ap. You can do a lot of the basic stuff and some of the more complex stuff that PhotoShop does and then post the pictures directly into Flickr, Facebook etc. or Splashup will even host them for you.

http://www.splashup.com

This really impressive for a free website!
best
Nik