iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

For years I have referred readers to the University of Nottingham's Periodic Table of Videos. That table provides a video about every element that is in the Periodic Table. A few years ago the producers of the Periodic Table of Videos partnered with TED-Ed to create lessons about every element in the Periodic Table.

I recently discovered Boclips for Teachers, a portal hosting more than 2 million short-form educational videos from more than 100 of the educational video producers you already know and love.

Familiar sites like TED-Ed, LearnZillion, Associated Press, PBS, Crash Course, Reuters, Bozeman Science and Smithsonian have offered permission for the site to curate their excellent content in a distraction-free, ad-free environment. Content is selected by teachers for teachers.

Boclips for Teachers spans age/grade levels and disciplines. Content includes instructional video, animations, mini-documentaries, historical footage, breaking news and virtual reality. Teachers may use the platform to share, edit, and store videos or they might easily copy BoClips links to share on their own websites and learning management systems. Unfortunately, the search does not yet allow users to filter for subject, age level, curriculum standards, etc

Looking for some good iPad apps to help you create educational videos to share with students? The collection below has you covered. It features what we think are some of the best video apps in iTunes App Store. Using the apps below will enable you to create short educational or instructional videos,  merge multiple clips into a single video, annotate videos, add text and multimedia materials to your videos and many more.

You might watch Netflix, HBO Go, or Hulu Plus for personal use on your iPad, but while these may not always be appropriate for students, there are many free iPad apps for streaming video that will work great in your classroom. The days of running to the VCR to record a clip from a television program are long gone. If you want to hook students with a film clip, to connect your classwork to reality television, or to inspire children’s interest in a topic through educational programming, there are many apps that can be used to stream content on your iPad.

For those of you asking about video lesson tools, below is a collection we published a few months ago featuring some of our favourite tools in this regard.  You can use these tools  to  create instructional videos and tutorials in a simple and easy way without the need for an advanced technology knowledge. All of these tools are web based, no software download is required.

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Here are some alternative video sites to YouTube. They each occupy a different niche, but are worth adding to your bookmarks.

It has always been good advice to take what you see on the internet with a pinch of salt, but online video has lately become even less trustworthy. Deepfakes, clips altered or fabricated with an artificial intelligence technique called machine learning, make alternative realities easier to create and disseminate.

In the video above, Sam Gregory, a program director at nonprofit Witness, which promotes the use of video to defend human rights, tells WIRED that we should prepare to see a lot more deepfakes. Not all of them will be friendly—and there won’t immediately be a technical solution to identify and block them, as with spam email. “We’re going to get more and more of this content and it’s probably going to get of better quality,” Gregory says.

Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you might need to trim video to remove all the unusable parts when you are editing video. However, how do you trim a video? This post lists several ways to help you trim a video effectively.

Your smartphone is a very capable video camera. Learn from a pro video producer on how to take advantage of all it's features and shoot the best video possible.

You might watch Netflix, HBO Go, or Hulu Plus for personal use on your iPad, but while these may not always be appropriate for students, there are many free iPad apps for streaming video that will work great in your classroom. The days of running to the VCR to record a clip from a television program are long gone. If you want to hook students with a film clip, to connect your classwork to reality television, or to inspire children’s interest in a topic through educational programming, there are many apps that can be used to stream content on your iPad.

Explore.org offers the largest collection of live nature webcams on the web. In the gallery of live webcams you will find video feeds featuring owls in their nests, ospreys in their nests, and bald eagles in nests, and video feeds featuring puffins. As it is spring in the northern hemisphere, the bird videos feeds are the best they will be all year because birds will soon be hatching in those nests seen the webcams.