This past week, I was fortunate enough to have been awarded summer travel funding to attend this year’s American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) conference in Panama City, Panamá. Along with me, my colleagues Mallorie Fonseca and Carla Civita-Garcia were granted funding, and we were able to go as a Lower School foreign language department. Before attending any sessions, we decided to “divide and conquer” as many sessions as we could and created a Google Word document that we all shared and were able to notate our observations and takeaways. Even at the sessions that we attended together, it was interesting to see how three educators interpreted a workshop differently. Or, if one person missed a point, the other team member was able to jot down the information.
One of my favorite sessions happened to be the first session that attended and was presented by a professor that I met at last year’s conference in San Antonio. Yohanna Jimenez’s presentation, “Optimizing YouTube Videos in the World Language Classroom,” produced many takeaways for me. Some benefits to using YouTube videos are:
Professor Jimenez brilliantly introduced nine web-based applications and technology tools:
1. TubeChop-allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video to share it.
2. ViewPure-strips off the extras of any YouTube page. Say goodbye to unrelated material, advertisement, or otherwise added videos.
3. KeepVid-allows you to download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Video, Metacafe, Putfile, and more. Free and requires no registration-DOESN’T WORK WITH MAC :-(
4. DragOnTape- is a web app that makes it possible to combine multiple YouTube videos into one long, continuous video. It creates a link that is easy to share with others.
5. Amara- is a platform for captioning and subtitling videos. It allows users to transcribe, translate and order subtitles and captions to any YouTube video. You can do Karaoke with students using this!
6. Ted-Ed- turns a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. Users can add context, questions, discussion items, and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube. Blubbr is similar to this. Always click on your name above to “Create a Lesson.” Launch Lesson Editor. You have to put the time for of the video where you’ll find the answer. It gives you a spreadsheet of all the students that answer and the results!
7. VideoAnt- turns a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. Users can add context, questions, discussion items, and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube.
8. Vialogues is a Web 2.0 tool providing a platform for asynchronous discussions centered around videos. Comments are hyperlinked to different parts of the video timeline. Different from Ted-Ed because students can have a conversation and not just answer a question.
9. Popcorn Maker- helps you easily remix web video, audio and images into mashups that you can embed on other websites. It allows dragging and dropping content from the web, then add comments and links-all within your browser.
As I was listening to her workshop, I brainstormed ways to bring this back to my classroom. Thankfully, she did a quick demonstration of each tool with basic instructions on how to get started. Two tools that I’ve been playing with and hope to have my students use are Ted-Ed and Popcorn Maker. With Ted-Ed, I can easily create online assessments using YouTube videos that will allow me to evaluate student progress in a meaningful way. Students can watch the video, take a quiz, see immediate feedback and dig deeper into resources that instructors can provide via a unique URL. From my perspective, this program is almost like a “video quiz” and gives a “gaming” aspect to a traditional assessment. Popcorn Maker is a program that will benefit students when creating projects with their laptops. What are some of the many things that you can do with Popcorn Maker? Users can edit/trim videos, eliminate audio, add maps from Google that the viewer can explore, add articles from the web, add hyperlinks to text and pop ups for the viewer to click and go elsewhere on the web, pull in live images from Flickr by entering a tag, create a live twitter feed/ticker, and loop video clips. I know this tool will be a favorite amongst the students.
One of my favorite sessions happened to be the first session that attended and was presented by a professor that I met at last year’s conference in San Antonio. Yohanna Jimenez’s presentation, “Optimizing YouTube Videos in the World Language Classroom,” produced many takeaways for me. Some benefits to using YouTube videos are:
- to provide linguistic and cultural content and information in and related to the target language
- to deliver insights into or representations of cultural information (artifacts, history, politics, popular figures, traditions) without physically traveling to the target country
- to enhance conversation, listening, and pronunciation skills
- to improve reading and writing activities
- to promote authentic vocabulary development
- to expose students to authentic language
- to enhance the classroom learning experience with access wherever and whenever
- to provide a free supplement material to regular class materials with regard to making classes more interesting and relevant to course materials
Professor Jimenez brilliantly introduced nine web-based applications and technology tools:
1. TubeChop-allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video to share it.
2. ViewPure-strips off the extras of any YouTube page. Say goodbye to unrelated material, advertisement, or otherwise added videos.
3. KeepVid-allows you to download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Video, Metacafe, Putfile, and more. Free and requires no registration-DOESN’T WORK WITH MAC :-(
4. DragOnTape- is a web app that makes it possible to combine multiple YouTube videos into one long, continuous video. It creates a link that is easy to share with others.
5. Amara- is a platform for captioning and subtitling videos. It allows users to transcribe, translate and order subtitles and captions to any YouTube video. You can do Karaoke with students using this!
6. Ted-Ed- turns a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. Users can add context, questions, discussion items, and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube. Blubbr is similar to this. Always click on your name above to “Create a Lesson.” Launch Lesson Editor. You have to put the time for of the video where you’ll find the answer. It gives you a spreadsheet of all the students that answer and the results!
7. VideoAnt- turns a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. Users can add context, questions, discussion items, and follow-up suggestions to any video on TED-Ed or YouTube.
8. Vialogues is a Web 2.0 tool providing a platform for asynchronous discussions centered around videos. Comments are hyperlinked to different parts of the video timeline. Different from Ted-Ed because students can have a conversation and not just answer a question.
9. Popcorn Maker- helps you easily remix web video, audio and images into mashups that you can embed on other websites. It allows dragging and dropping content from the web, then add comments and links-all within your browser.
As I was listening to her workshop, I brainstormed ways to bring this back to my classroom. Thankfully, she did a quick demonstration of each tool with basic instructions on how to get started. Two tools that I’ve been playing with and hope to have my students use are Ted-Ed and Popcorn Maker. With Ted-Ed, I can easily create online assessments using YouTube videos that will allow me to evaluate student progress in a meaningful way. Students can watch the video, take a quiz, see immediate feedback and dig deeper into resources that instructors can provide via a unique URL. From my perspective, this program is almost like a “video quiz” and gives a “gaming” aspect to a traditional assessment. Popcorn Maker is a program that will benefit students when creating projects with their laptops. What are some of the many things that you can do with Popcorn Maker? Users can edit/trim videos, eliminate audio, add maps from Google that the viewer can explore, add articles from the web, add hyperlinks to text and pop ups for the viewer to click and go elsewhere on the web, pull in live images from Flickr by entering a tag, create a live twitter feed/ticker, and loop video clips. I know this tool will be a favorite amongst the students.
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