Strategies for integrating video into your lessons

Enriching your lessons with video is a snap due to countless online video resources.

To help you navigate the maze of video sites, let's narrow down the list to three excellent choices.

First let's go to the world's largest video site, YouTube. If YouTube is blocked in your school, we'll look at ways to help later on in this presentation.

Where do you start with so many videos available? A great place is the YouTube education section.

Scroll down the page and browse educational channels. Click a channel to view the videos.

Once you are in a YouTube channel, the easiest way to find a video is in the grid view.

Click a video to watch. The advantage of viewing from a YouTube channel, instead of a general search, is the elimination of suggested videos. Only videos in the selected channel appear.

Of course you can type any search term to find videos.

We'll look at easy ways to get rid of suggested videos and comments a little later.

Now let's explore Khan Academy.

Khan Academy has received international recognition for excellent educational videos, including a large selection for math education.

Click Watch a video.

Select a category and subcategory.

Click a video title.

When the video opens, notice the Download button. This is a great way to save videos directly to your computer for later use.

To save a video to your computer, Right-click on the Download button and select Save Target As. Navigate to a folder to store videos and click Save.

A site that collects and curates educational videos from numerous resources is WatchKnowLearn.org

Start by selecting an age filter.

Type a search term, leave the dropdown list set to WatchKnow for the broadest search and click Search.

Click the video title to view the video.

Now let's explore ways to customize online videos.

The first tip we'll explore is getting rid of all junk on a YouTube page to make it suitable for classroom use.

Right-click the video and click Copy embed html.

Paste the embed html code into a Word document.

Select the URL up to the question mark.

Copy the selected URL. Click Copy or Press CTRL + C.

TIP: If you want to keep this video URL for later use, paste the URL into a new document. An Excel spreadsheet works great for saving and categorizing your videos.

Paste the URL into your browser. You now have a YouTube video without any extraneous content.

Often times you will find the perfect video on YouTube but you only want to show a portion of the video. Use TubeChop.

Copy the URL of a YouTube video.

Paste into TubeChop and click Search.

Drag the time in and time out markers to select the part of the video you wish to keep and click the chop it button.

You now have a link to your edited video. Be sure and save this link for future use.

Now let's explore editing and combining several YouTube videos into one production.

Watch this demo of creating custom videos using Drag On Tape.

To save the link to your video, click embed. Then, click the URL and copy the link (CTRL + C).

Some schools block YouTube. Here's a way to save YouTube videos to your computer so they are viewable offline.

Watch this screencast of downloading a YouTube video.

An excellent video downloading application is RealPlayer.

After you download and install the software, you can easy download almost any video on the internet.

When RealPlayer is installed, hovering over a video will open the Download this Video menu.

Click the Download this Video link and your video is saved.

If you need to change your videos to another format, such as WMV, click Convert All.

We hope you have learned some new techniques regarding finding, editing and saving videos for classroom use.

We would like to hear your tips and tricks. Post a message on the Teacher Experience Exchange!