December 14, 2011

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December 14, 2011/

Learning in Hand with Tony Vincent

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Practical Pointers for YouTube

Practical Pointers for YouTube

If you’re a teacher, there's a good chance that you use YouTube. Whether you send students to your own videos or someone else's, I think you’ll find many of these pointers particularly handy.

Working on a computer and want to insert emojis? You can see a listing of emojis at emojicopy.com. Click an emoji to add it to the lineup. Click the copy button after your lineup is complete and then paste anywhere you can type.

If you’ve got a lot of links that you access frequently, then you might consider adding folders to Chrome’s bookmarks bar. Organizing links to web pages and online documents into folders in the bookmarks bar can give you access to those items in two clicks.

👀 How about adding visual cues to your digital calendar with emojis? Since emojis can be entered anywhere you can enter text, you can add emojis to calendar events. I include a meaningful emoji that serves as an icon for each event in my calendar. When I view my calendar on my computer, tablet, phone, or watch, the emojis provide illustration.

There is not an emoji for everything, so symbolically representing vocabulary can be a stretch—a really big thinking stretch when you’re the one developing the representation. It can take a while to figure out how to clearly show a vocabulary term with emojis, which is why symbolically representing vocabulary can be a great learning activity.

👋😁 Enter text into emojitranslate.com. It replaces some words with pictures. You can copy the “emojified” text and paste it anywhere. This is handy for spicing up instructions, playing with language, making announcements, telling a story, and getting a laugh.

🎬👀👍 Want to learn how to make your videos even more awesome? How about joining me for Classy Videos Summer 2018? My online workshop takes place in Google Classroom July 3 through August 13, 2018. Each week I produce a new instructional video, and each week there’s an optional assignment where you get to practice the skills from the video. Classmates and I give encouragement and feedback on assignments. I lead this workshop last winter and absolutely loved the short videos that my classmates produced. Join the 75+ educators who have already registered for #ClassyVideos Summer 2018. Read more and register at learninginhand.com.

I like being one click away from each of the webpages and documents that I frequently open. I’ve added links to what I often visit to Chrome’s bookmarks bar. The problem is most of the things I’ve bookmarked have long names–names that take up precious space. I deal with that by right-clicking each bookmark and replacing the name with a descriptive emoji. For example, I often access a Google document about tech camp. I’ve added the document to my bookmark’s bar and have replaced the name with a tent emoji. The bookmark takes up less space, allowing me to fit more links onto the bookmarks bar. 👍

The suggested videos that are shown after a YouTube video finished playing can be annoying, distracting, and sometimes inappropriate. If you’d like to share a link to a YouTube video and do not want suggested videos to be displayed when the video finishes, add ?rel=0 to the end of the video’s URL before you share it.

Flaticon.com has a growing collection of icons and clipart. In fact, they boast that 4,000 icons are added each month. You’ll most likely be downloading images as PNG. PNG images can be used in pretty much any app. PNG supports transparency, so you’ll see no white boxes around these icons! While you can use Flaticon for free, you are required to attribute the illustration to Flaticon. If you pay $90 a year or $10 a month for a Premium subscription you can use all illustrations without any attribution. Paid subscribers also get access to premium icons.