#ETT Google Reflection

On Friday, 27 February 2015, I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Google Headquarters in Cambridge, MA as part of a fun-filled day of workshops sponsored by EdTechTeacher.org, in collaboration with Google.  I left feeling inspired, imagining how schools might find ways to carve out the creative space that makes Google such an invigorating and innovative place.

My favorite workshop, Choose Your Adventure YouTube, was taught by Greg Kulowiec, a former Social Studies teacher.  The basic concept of his presentation was that YouTube can be used as a creative and collaborative tool for students to tell a variety of stories, increasing their engagement and buy in, while having an authentic audience.

So far, I've experimented with this idea, using footage of the musical hat that I made for the event, but I didn't leave quite enough wait time on the first clip.  If you are fast, clicking on the link within the video will take you to another video clip.  Doing something like this with students, for an authentic purpose, would be a fun way to bring more video making to the classroom!

Here are some of the biggest aha's that I took away:

• YouTube Capture is a useful app for capturing footage and quickly uploading it to YouTube.

• Breaking students up into groups is a good idea.  They can each work on a different component of the video and then add their FINAL video clips to a shared folder in Google Drive.

• You can give your students a special email address for mobile uploads that allows them to send video footage directly to your desired YouTube Channel, by going into the settings and mobile uploads. You can change this address to control when clips are uploaded to your account by clicking the link under the special email address.  (See the example below.)

• In the video, itself, you can only link to other videos (or Google+ profiles), not directly to documents. It is, however, a good idea to put a link to sources or additional information within the description of the video.

Using iMovie and YouTube Video Editor to Create a Visual Essay

As a requirement for a class that I'm taking, I combined the use of Google Drawings, Pixlr photo editor, an animation app on my iPad, iMovie, and YouTube video editor to create a visual essay.  I enjoyed the process.  

You Tube Video Editing Tips

This week, I've been working with my students to create their own Google Sites, with the understanding that any images or video that they post to their sites need to be licensed with a Creative Commons license and properly cited.

After several failed attempts, I created my first video using YouTube's video editor and was able to successfully create a screen cast of my process!

Here is my first mash-up video:

Here is my screen cast, explaining how to create your own mash-up video.

Here is a copy of my copyright dispute!  While the original YouTube video was approved, the screen cast of me teaching how to create the video was flagged for using third party content, the song "Hot Buttered Popcorn," which was featured in the clip.   This was a terrific lesson on the nuances of copyright and fair use.